w 


r4 


&§6®M 


Htm*£k 


o> 


^ys 


\ 


*****>****«*£. 


*\w 


•%> 


*>*», 


PRINCETON,  N.  J. 


35 


•  EB 


5//^ 


Division :4-/.  ~~"  ^3 

Section.. 

ATt4?nber 


■ 


CJ 


0\ 


a 


_^ 


>A 


HEATHENDOM  AND  CHRISTENDOM 


THE  VIKINGS 


IN 


WESTERN  CHRISTENDOM 


A.D.  789  TO  A.D.  888 


BY 

C.    F.     KEARY,    M  A.,    F.S.A. 

AUTHOR    OF 

"OUTLINES    OF    PRIMITIVE    BELIEF,"     "THE    DAWN    OF    HISTORY,' 

ETC.,  BTC 


WITH    MAP    AND    TABLES 


NEW  YORK 

G.  P.  PUTNAM'S  SONS 

LONDON  :    T.    FISHER    UNWIN 

1891 


Non  ha  Vottimo  artisia  alcun  concetto, 

Ctiun  mar  mo  solo  in  se  non  circonscriva, 

Col  suo  soverchio. 

Michelangelo. 


PREFACE. 


The  present  volume  is  concerned  with  that  period  in  the  history 
of  the  Scandinavian  peoples  when  they  were  growing,  but  had 
not  yet  fully  grown,  into  nationalities,  and  when,  therefore,  their 
true  national  history  had  not  begun.  Every  historic  people  has 
passed  through  this  early  formative  period,  its  age  of  Sturm 
und  Drang ;  and  it  may  be  said  that  every  nationality  which 
is  worthy  of  the  name  has  looked  back  upon  that  age  with 
a  peculiar  affection  and  with  a  sort  of  reverence.  It  has,  in 
consequence,  overlaid  the  faint  traditions  of  it  with  a  garment 
of  mythology,  out  of  which  it  is  in  most  cases  possible 
only  here  and  there  to  separate  a  shred  of  historical  truth. 
The  result  is  that  the  very  phase  in  the  development  of  the 
people  about  which  we  most  long  to  know,  is  the  one  about 
which  we  are  condemned  to  the  completest  ignorance.  The 
Viking  Age  of  the  Northern  Folk  differs  from  the  correspond- 
ing epochs  in  the  history  of  other  nations  in  this — that  it  is 
illuminated  by  a  faint  ray  of  real  history  lent  from  the  pages  of 
contemporary  but  alien  chroniclers,  the  chroniclers,  I  mean,  of 
Christian  Europe.  Were  it  not  for  this  faint  gleam,  the  earliest 
age  of  the  Vikings  would  have  remained  for  us  as  a  mere 
tradition,  something  known  to  have  been,  but  not  presentable 


iv  PREFACE. 

in  any  realizable  form  ;  much,  in  fact,  what  the  Dorian  Migra- 
tion is  in  the  history  of  Greece.  As  it  is,  by  the  aid  of  the 
contemporary  records  I  have  spoken  of,  we  can  present  the 
northern  migration  in  a  clearer  guise. 

For  all  that,  a  distinction  must  be  drawn  between  the  earliest 
and,  as  I  would  call  it,  true  Viking  Age,  and  the  actual  history 
of  the  Scandinavian  Folk  as  recorded  by  themselves.  Viking 
expeditions  continued  to  be  made  during  the  later  historical 
period.  But  they  took  a  different  character  from  those  of 
the  earlier  age,  and  they  no  longer  absorbed  so  large  a  part 
of  the  activity  of  the  people  ;  at  any  rate  they  no  longer 
constituted,  as  they  do  for  our  period,  the  only  phase  of 
national  activity  whereof  the  records  remain.  Thus,  though 
the  expression  Viking  Age  is  often  employed  with  a  much  wider 
significance,  it  would,  I  think,  be  an  advantage,  could  its  use 
be  confined  to  just  this  epoch  in  the  life  of  the  Northern 
people  and  to  no  other ;  to  their  age  of  Storm  and  Stress,  the 
age  of  their  formation. 

It  would  be  an  advantage,  too,  if  it  were  more  generally 
borne  in  mind  that  the  history  of  the  North  begins  now  and 
at  no  earlier  time.  The  Vikings  of  this  period  are  for  us  the 
whole  Scandinavian  people  ;  we  know  no  other — if,  at  any  rate, 
we  except  a  notice  here  and  there  of  the  kings  of  Southern 
Denmark.  But  the  pre-eminence  of  the  antiquaries  of  the 
North,  overshadowing  the  study  of  Scandinavian  history,  has 
rather  tended  to  obscure  this  fact.  All  histories  (almost)  of 
Scandinavian  lands  begin  with  prehistoric  antiquities,  which 
are  not  history.  Or  it  may  be  that  the  historians  of  these 
countries  have  not  liked  to  realize  how  far  down  in  time  their 
history  begins  ;  so  that  prehistoric  discoveries  or  unauthenti- 
cated  traditions  preserved  in  the  sagas  of  a  later  age  have  been 
brought  in  to  fill  up  what  is  for  History  in  the  proper  sense  of 
the  word  a  mere  blank. 


PREFACE.  v 

Such,  then,  is  the  interest  attaching  to  the  age  of  the 
Vikings  from  the  point  of  view  of  Scandinavian  history.  But 
its  records  are  so  shadowy  that  it  would  not  be  possible  to 
claim  for  it  a  very  large  amount  of  attention  upon  that 
score  alone.  For  universal  history — or  say  for  the  history 
of  Europe  generally — it  has  a  much  deeper  interest,  as  one 
phase,  and  a  very  important  one,  of  the  long  struggle  be- 
tween Christianity  and  the  Heathenism  of  the  North.  And 
it  is  under  this  aspect  that  the  history  is  treated  in  the  present 
volume.  Otherwise  there  would  be  no  adequate  excuse  for 
the  three  chapters  with  which  the  volume  opens,  nor  for  the 
one  with  which  it  concludes.  These  four  chapters  are  not, 
strictly  speaking,  concerned  with  the  Vikings ;  but  they  are 
concerned  very  intimately  with  the  relations  of  Heathenism — 
that  is  to  say  Teutonic  Heathenism — to  Christianity  and  to 
Christian  Europe.  It  has  always  been  the  intention,  or  at 
any  rate  the  hope,  of  the  present  writer  to  carry  on  the  study 
of  this  epoch  one  stage  further ;  namely,  to  the  formation  and 
to  the  early  history  of  the  Scandinavian  conquests  and  colonies 
in  France,  in  the  British  Isles,  in  the  islands  of  the  North 
Atlantic  ;  and,  as  a  pendant  to  this  external  history,  to  the  rise 
of  the  Edda  and  Saga  literature  and  of  the  mythology  which 
they  enshrine— the  last  articulate  voice  of  Teutonic  Heathen- 
ism. If  such  an  enlarged  study  were  ever  completed,  then 
the  three  opening  chapters  of  this  volume  would  serve  as  an 
introduction  to  the  whole,  and  the  concluding  chapter  as  a 
link  between  this  volume  and  the  next.  The  half-title,  too, 
'  Heathendom  and  Christendom,'  would  stand  not  for  this 
volume  only,  but  for  any — one  or  more — succeeding  one 
likewise. 

I  may,  perhaps,  be  allowed  to  add  that,  to  the  best  of  my 
recollection,  this  book  was  begun  in  the  earlier  part  of  1882  ; 


viii  CONTENTS. 

PAGE 

CHAPTER  IV. 

THE  FIRST  CONTESTS. 

i.  First  Danish  attack  on.  Christendom. — ii.  Charlemagne's  Saxon 
war. — iii.  First  Viking  raids,  A.D.  789-807. — iv.  Charlemagne 
and  Godfred       ...  ...  ...  ...  ...  ...     121 

CHAPTER  V. 

CHARACTER  OF  THE  VIKINGS. 

i.  Shipbuilding  in  the  Baltic. — ii.  The  Vikings  as  'adventurers' 
and  as  soldiers. — iii.  Enforced  exile.  The  ideal  Viking  leader. 
— iv.  The  Scandinavian  countries. — v.  Abandonment  of  the 
ancient  gods.  Fate. — vi.  Strangeness  of  the  Christian  world  to 
the  first  Vikings     .„  ...  ...  ...     155 

CHAPTER  VI. 

THE   VIKINGS  IN  IRELAND. 

i.   Baldness  of  all  narratives  of  early  Viking  raids. — ii.  Polit'cal  con- 
dition   of    Ireland.     Viking    raids,   A.D.    807-833.       Turgesius 
•     occupies   half   Ireland.  — iii.  Raids   on    England   from    Ireland. 
Death  of  Turgesius.     The  three  Viking  '  kingdoms'  in  Ireland     185 

CHAPTER  VII. 

LEWIS   THE  PIOUS.     THE   CONQUESTS  OF 
CHRISTIANITY. 

i.  Extension  of  Christianity  towards  the  Baltic— ii.  Character  of 
Lewis  the  Pious. — iii.  Civil  war  in  Denmark.  Conversion  of 
Harald. — iv.  Mission  of  Anscar  to  Denmark  and  Sweden      ...     20S 

CHAPTER  VIII. 

CIVIL  WAR. 

i.  Forces  tending  to  the  disintegration  of  the  Empire.  Church  and 
State.  Rise  of  nationalities.  Second  marriage  of  Lewis.  Birth 
of  Charles  (the  Bald).— ii.  Outbreak  of  the  Civil  War.  The 
'  1  ield  of  Lies.'— iii.  Restoration  of  Lewis. — iv.  Death  of  Lewis 
th<-  l'ious.—v.  Battle  of  Fontenoy.      Peace  of  Verdun  ...     235 


CONTENTS.  -       ix 

PAGE 

CHAPTER  IX. 

RAIDS  IN  THE  FRANK1SH  EMPIRE,  A.D.  834-845. 

i.  Viking  raids  at  the  mouth  of  the  Rhine  ;  of  the  Seine  ;  of  the 
Loire  ;  in  England.  Nantes  plundered.  Vikings  up  the  Garonne 
and  off  the  coast  of  Spain. — ii.  Attack  on  Hamburg.  Ragnar 
Lodbrok.     Attack  on  Paris.     Miracle  ...  ...  ...     269 

CHAPTER  X. 
DEFENCES  BROKEN  DOWN,  A.D.  846-858. 

i.  Peaceful  relations  between  Christians  and  Scandinavians.  The 
Swedish  mission.  King  Horik  and  Anscar. — ii.  Fresh  attacks 
on  Frisia  and  France  ;  Oscar's  fleet  at  Bordeaux,  Rorik's  on  the 
Rhine,  &c.  Attacks  on  England.  Battle  of  Ockley.  The  Vikings 
begin  to  winter  in  France  and  England. — iii.  Charles  the  Bald 
and  the  Bretons.  The  Vikings  on  the  Loire.  Abdication  and 
death  of  Lothair. — iv.  Second  civil  war  in  Denmark.  Charles 
the  Bald  and  the  Aquitanians. — v.  Siege  of  the  Vikings  in 
Oissel,  A.D.  858.  Lewis  the  German  invades  West  Francia. 
The  siege  of  Oissel  raised. — vi.  Effects  of  the  breakdown  of  the 
Oissel  siege         ...  ...  ...  ...  ...  ...     295 

CHAPTER  XI. 
DECAY  AND  REDINTEGRATION,  A.D.  859-866. 

i.  Changes  in  the  Carlovingian  Empire. — ii.  Danes  attack  Norse- 
men in  Ireland. — iii.  Means  of  defence  adopted  by  Charles 
the  Bald.  Cavalry.  Fortifications.  Condition  of  peasantry. — 
iv.  Rise  of  new  Houses  in  France  and  Germany.  The  Welfings. 
The  Liudolfings.  Robert  the  Strong.  Hincmar. — v.  Vikings 
on  the  Seine  and  Somme.     Death  of  Robert  the  Strong  ...     329 

CHAPTER  XII. 

THE  GREAT  ARMY. 

i.  Expedition  by  Hasting  and  Bjorn  into  Spain  and  into  the 
Mediterranean.  Siege  of  Luna. — ii.  Legends  of  the  death  of 
Ragnar  Lodbrok.  Review  of  the  Viking  attacks  on  England  up 
to  A.D.  866.— iii.  Coming  of  the  Great  Army.  The  Army  in 
Northumbria  ;  in  Mercia  ;  in  East  Anglia.  Destruction  of  monas- 


CONTENTS. 

PAGB 

teries.  Martyrdom  of  Eadmund. — iv.  The  Army  in  West 
Saxony  ;  at  Reading.  Battles  of  Englefield,  Reading,  Ashdown, 
Basing,  Merton.  Accession  of  ^Elfred.  Battle  of  Wilton.  The 
Vikings  in  London  ;  at  Torksey  ;  at  Repton.  Exile  of  Burgred, 
king  of  Mercia. — v.  Norse  and  Danish  blood  in  England. 
Guthorm's  army  in  Wessex.  Battle  of  iEthandune.  Peace  of 
Wedmore  ...  ...  ...  ...  ...  ...     358 


CHAPTER  XIII. 

PAUSE  IN  THE  VIKING  RAIDS. 

Pause  in  the  Viking  raids  on  the  Continent.  Condition  of  the 
kingdoms  north  of  the  Alps,  A.D.  866-870.  Death  of  Lothair  II., 
A.D.  869. — ii.  Invasion  of  Lotharingia  by  Charles  the  Bald. 
Partition  of  Meersen.  Death  of  the  Emperor  Lewis  II.,  a.d. 
875. — hi.  The  Carling  House  towards  the  end  of  the  ninth 
century. — iv.  Charles  the  Bald  emperor.  Renewed  Viking 
attacks  on  France.  Death  of  Lewis  the  German.  Charles  the 
Bald  invades  East  Lotharingia.  Battle  of  Andernach  and  defeat 
of  Charles  ...  ...  ...  ...  ...  ...     405 

CHAPTER  XIV. 

CHARIES  THE  FAT     THE  INVASION  OF  GERMANY. 

Death  of  Charles  the  Bald. — ii.  Reign  of  Lewis  the  Stammerer. — 
iii.  Boso,  king  of  Lower  Burgundy.  Vikings  return  from  England 
to  the  Continent.  Battle  of  Thuin.  Total  defeat  of  Saxons  on 
Liineburg  Heath.  Defeat  of  Vikings  at  Saucourt. — iv.  Advance 
of  Godfred's  army  up  the  Rhine.  Besieged  by  Charles  the  Fat 
at  Ashloh.  Shameful  termination  of  the  siege. — v.  Death  of 
Lewis,  king  of  West  Francia.  Renewed  attacks  on  France. 
Desperate  condition  of  Western  Christendom,  A.D.  882-3. — 
vi.  Godfred  and  Hugh  of  Lorraine.     Murder  of  Godfred  ...     43S 

CHAPTER  XV. 
THE  SIEGE  OF  PARIS. 

Death  of  Carloman,  king  of  West  Francia,  Decembei,  884. 
(  harles  the  Fat  inherits  the  empire  of  Charlemange.  Siegfred's 
army  advances  up  the  Seine  and  begins  the  Siege  of  Paris,  A.D. 
885. —  ii.  Cessation  of  attacks  till  January,  886.  Renewal  of  the 
siege.      Death   of  Bishop   Go/lin.      Odo   departs   to   seek    as- 


CONTENTS.  xi 


PAGE 


sistance  from  the  emperor.  Death  of  Duke  Henry  of  East 
Francia  in  attempting  to  relieve  garrison.  Charles  arrives 
before  Paris  ;  pays  ransom  and  allows  Vikings  to  proceed  to 
Upper  Burgundy. — iii.  Deposition  of  Charles  the  Fat,  A.D.  887. 
Arnolf,  king  of  Germany.  Separation  of  Latin-speaking  peoples. 
Kingdoms  of  France,  Upp~r  Burgundy,  Lower  Burgundy, 
Italy    ...  ...  ...  ...  ...  ...  ...     468 


CHAPTER  XVI. 

THE  CREED  OF  CHRISTENDOM. 

i.  Nature  of  the  rivalry  of  creeds  between  Heathendom  and  Christen- 
dom.— ii.  The  Pope  and  the  Emperor. — iii.  The  Pope  and 
the  Frankish  Church.  The  false  decretals.  Nicholas  I.  and 
Hincmar.— iv.  Nicholas  I.  and  Lothair  II. ;  the  Pope  and  the 
Lotharingian  Church.  Judgment  upon  Lothair  II. — v.  Popular 
aspect  of  the  rivalry  between  the  Pope  and  the  Frankish 
Church.  The  Sacramental  doctrine. — vi.  Echoes  of  Old  German 
Heathenism. — The  Merseburg  formulae.  Popular  Christianity: 
Heliand,  Muspilli  ...  ...  ...  ...  ...     497 

TABLES    ...  ...  ...  ...  ...  ...  ...     542 

INDEX      .«  ...  ...  ...  ...  ~.  ...    551 


r^ 


L_— 5£% 

w~~ 

<? 

CHAPTER  I. 
HE  A  THENDOM. 

I. 

There  are  few  physical  features  in  our  Europe  to-day  more 
impressive  than  the  remains  of  those  Roman  roads  which  once 
traversed  every  land  owning  the  Roman  sway,  and  which  have 
withstood  so  wonderfully  the  wear  of  time.  In  every  western 
country  of  Europe  traces  of  these  roads  are  to  be  found  still 
recognizable,  though  in  most  they  have  been  absorbed  into 
a  more  modern  system.  Such  has  been  the  case  with  us  as  in 
France.  But  still  the  ancient  highways  can  be  well  mide  out — 
our  Watling  Street,  Fosse  Way,  Icknield  Street,  Ermine  Street. 
In  many  parts  of  Spain  these  Roman  roads  remain  untouched, 
but  grass-grown  and  half-ruined,  while  beside  them  run  the 
mule  paths,  which  are  all  that  the  indolent  country  now  cares 
to  keep  in  repair  and  use.  Each  one  of  these  roads  is  a  natural 
symbol  of  the  state  which  brought  it  into  existence,  in  its 
directness  of  purpose,  its  unswerving  determination  and  con- 
tempt of  obstacles,  and  likewise  in  a  certain  prosaic  plainness. 
Yet  we  cannot  call  these  roads  prosaic  in  the  sum.  so  inimit- 
able are  they  in  their  vast,  undaunted  length,  and  even  in  the 
uniformity  of  their  plan.    Standing  upon  them  you  realize  better 

2 


2  HEATHENDOM. 

than  in  any  other  way  the  long  arm  of  Roman  justice.  If  you 
put  your  ear  to  them,  and  the  cloud-gates  of  Time  will  roll  aside 
for  a  moment  for  you,  you  may  still  hear  along  all  their  length 
the  tramp  of  legionaries,  the  challenges  of  the  guard,  the  hurry- 
ing feet  of  merchants  or  of  slaves ;  and  you  will  reflect,  with 
pleasure  or  the  reverse  of  it  according  to  your  bent,  how  these 
were  once  the  iron  girdles  which  bound  together  all  the 
members  of  a  mighty  empire  in  an  unchanging  rule  of  justice 
and  of  law. 

From  Italy  into  France  these  roads  made  their  way  by  the 
Riviera,  or  by  the  valleys  of  the  two  Doras  (Durias),  by  Mont 
Genevre  to  Briancon,  or  by  the  Little  St.  Bernard;  and  either 
way  at  last  to  Lyons,  which  was  the  heart  of  all  the  Roman  rule 
in  Gaul.  From  Lyons  again  they  led  on  by  Chalons,  Auxerre, 
Troyes,  the  other  Chalons,  to  Rheims;  from  Rheims  by  Amiens 
to  Boulogne ;  and  then  with  but  a  narrow  strip  of  intervening 
sea  to  Lymne,  or  Dover,  or  Richborough,  or  Ramsgate;1  thence 
to  Canterbury.  When  there  they  turned  into  that  greatest  of  our 
highways,  Watling  Street,  as  the  English  came  to  call  it;  for  it 
had  its  counterpart  in  the  great  highway  which  runs  through  the 
heavens.  Watling  Street  leads  on  through  London  to  Wroxeter; 
thence  to  Chester;  and  from  near  Chester  the  Roman  road  runs 
due  north  past  Manchester  as  far  as  Carlisle,  that  is  to  say,  as  far 
as  Hadrian's  wall.  On  the  east  side  there  is  a  corresponding 
road  which  runs  past  Lincoln  to  the  ford  across  the  Humber, 
to  many  other  chesters  in  the  north,  Winchester,  Lancheste?; 
Ebchester,  and  Chester  le  Street  (the  Castrum  on  the  Roman 
road),  up  likewise  to  Hadrian's  wall  and  beyond  it. 

Across  the  Pyrenees  and  into  Spain  these  roads  penetrated 
on  either  side  where  the  great  mountain  range  dips  down 
to    the   sea ;  on   the   east    from  Narbonne  to  Figueras,  from 

1  Of.  Map  in  Archceologia,  2nd  Series,  vol.  i.  (1888). 


THE  ROMAN  ROADS.  3 

Figueras  to  Gerona  ;  on  the  west  from  Bayonne  to  St.  Jean  de 
Luz  and  Tolosa.  There  was  likewise  on  this  west  side  another 
way  from  Dax,  north  of  Bayonne,  almost  due  south,  through  a 
pass  in  the  Pyrenees  to  Pampeluna.  The  pass  thus  formed 
btcame  in  later  )ears  very  famous  as  the  pass  of  Roncesvalles. 
Once  beyond  the  Pyrenees  the  Roman  roads  spread  out  a 
network  over  all  the  Spanish  peninsula. 

Through  the  Eastern  Alps,  too,  the  roads  made  their  way, 
over  the  Brenner  and  over  the  Spliigen  and  down  the  Swiss 
valley  of  the  Rhine.  Ammianus  Marcellinus,  describing  the 
dark,  swampy,  and  forbidding  character  of  this  last  region — 
the  approach  to  Lake  Constance — adds  that  nevertheless  '  the 
Romans,  with  their  usual  good  sense,  have  made  a  good  road 
thither'1 — that  is,  to  Brigantia,  or  Bregenz.  East  of  the  Upper 
Rhine  and  south  of  the  Upper  Danube,  at  Ulm,  at  Regensburg, 
these  roads  are  still  to  be  found.  But  as  we  travel  northward 
the  Rhine  more  and  more  becomes  the  dividing  line  between 
Rome  and  not-Rome,  and  you  come  to  the  true  German 
Germany  (deutsches  Deutschland),  a  region  into  which  the 
Romans  looked,  and  in  which  their  armies  marched  and 
countermarched,  but  which  never  bent  to  their  imperial 
sway. 

Those  who  are  all  for  classing  us  with  the  rest  of  the 
Teutonic  nationalities  cannot  get  over  the  existence  of  these 
Roman  roads  in  England,  and  all  that  they  imply.  These 
roads  were  the  veins  along  which  flowed  into  Western  Europe, 
first,  the  laws  and  customs  of  Rome,  afterwards  its  religion, 
though  this  last  probably  never  reached  the  extremities.  It 
was  vigorous  in  Gaul  Proper,  where  all  national  life  centred 
around  the  great  altar  of  Rome  and  Augustus  at  Lyons ; 
but  it   was  weak    by    comparison    in   the   German    provinces 

'Ammian.  Marcel,  xv.  4.  3. 


4  HE  A  THENDOM. 

(Germania  Superior,  Germania  Inferior),1  and  in  Britain. 
When  the  religion  of  Rome  changed  from  Paganism  to 
Christianity,  Christianity  in  its  turn  travelled  by  the  same 
routes,  but  made  its  way  further  than  Paganism  had  ever  done. 
It  was  only  for  a  short  time  that  P>ritain  was  cut  off  from 
connection  with  the  Continent.  When  the  great  age  of  Sturm 
und  Drang— the  age  of  what  are  called  the  Folk-wanderings 
(  Volkerwanderungen),  and  of  the  fall  of  Rome — had  passed, 
these  shores  were  again  brought  into  connection  with  Gaul, 
were  once  more  visited  by  Gaulish  vessels  and  Gaul  by  English. 
Only  in  the  interval  both  lands  had  been  overrun  by  a  Teu- 
tonic conqueror.  Gaul  was  on  the  highway  to  change  into 
Francia — France  ;  and  Britain  was  becoming,  or  had  become, 
England. 

Only  a  short  time  did  the  interruption  of  intercourse  between 
Britain  and  the  Continent  endure.  But  still  there  was  an  inter- 
ruption ;  and  it  so  happens  that  the  mythology  of  that  interval 
has  left  us  a  precious  relic  which  typifies  what  in  the  eyes  of 
men  who  still  made  part  of  the  'world'  of  the  Roman  Empire 
was  the  condition  of  those  who  had  been  separated  from  it.  The 
relic  I  speak  of  is  the  myth  current  among  the  fishermen  of 
Northern  Gaul  touching  the  mysterious  island  '  Brittia ' ;  a  place 
as  they  deemed  to  which  souls  were  wafted  after  death,  where, 
as  Claudian  thought,2  Ulysses  had  invoked  the  shades  from 
Hades  and  poured  blood  into  his  trench — 

Est  locus,  exlremum  pandit  qua  Gallia  littus, 
Oceani  pnetentus  aquis,  ubi  fertur  Ulixes 
Sanguine  libato  populum  movisse  silentem. 

1  These  two  provinces  were  both  on  the  west  side  of  the  Rhine.  They 
were,  however,  much  less  Romanized  than  those  provinces  further  south 
which  lay  north  or  east  of  the  Upper  Rhine  and  south  of  the  Danube 
( Rhsetia,  Noricum). 

2  In  Rufin.  i.  123-8.  The  place  which  Claudian  chooses  is  the  edge  of 
Gaul  opposite  Britain.  But  Procopius'  story  shows  that  the  myth  be'onged 
to  our  island. 


ROME  AND  NOT-ROME.  5 

Ulic  umbrarum  tenui  stridore  volantum 
FIel)ilis  auditur  questus.     Simulacra  coloni 
Pallida  defunctasque  vident  migrare  figuras. 

The  same  myth,  as  Procopius  relates  it  in  prose,  is  of  an  island, 
'  Brittia,'  half  of  which  was  a  habitation  for  the  living,  but  the 
other  half  was  set  apart  to  be  the  home  of  ghosts.  Between 
the  two  regions  stretched  a  wall  which  none  could  pass  and 
live;  whoever  did  cross  it  instantly  fell  dead  upon  the  other 
side,  so  pestilential  was  the  air.  But  serpents  and  all  venomous 
things  dwelt  on  the  other  side,  and  there  the  air  was  dark  and 
spirit-haunted.  The  fishermen  upon  the  Gaulish  coast  were 
made  the  ferrymen  of  the  dead,  and  on  account  of  this  strange 
duty,  we  are  assured,  they  were  exempt  from  the  ordinary 
incidence  of  taxation.  Their  task  fell  upon  them  in  rotation  ; 
those  villagers  whose  turn  had  come  were  awakened  at  dead  of 
night  by  a  gentle  tap  upon  the  door,  and  a  whispering  breath 
calling  them  to  the  beach.  There  lay  their  boats,  empty  to 
all  appearance,  and  yet  weighed  down  as  if  by  a  heavy 
load.  Pushing  off,  the  fishermen  performed  in  one  night 
a  voyage  which  else  they  could  hardly  accomplish,  rowing 
and  sailing,  in  six  days  and  nights.  When  they  had  arrived 
at  the  unknown  coast,  they  heard  names  called  over  and 
voices  answering  as  if  by  rotation,  while  they  felt  their  vessels 
gradually  growing  light ;  at  last  when  all  the  souls  had  landed 
the  boats  were  wafted  back  to  the  habitable  world.1 

This  description  has  often  been  quoted  before.  The 
great  value  for  our  purpose  of  this  piece  of  mythology  lies 
in  its  boldly  attaching  itself — or  with  the  faintest  disguise 
— to  a  land  formerly  so  well  known  as  Britain  was  to  the 
Romans — Britain,  the  birth-place  of  Constantine.  The  shores 
about  which  the  Gaulish  fishermen  themselves  entertained  so 
strange  a  belief,   whither  they   imagined  that  some   of  their 

1  Bell.  Goth.'w.  20. 


6  HE  A  THENDOM. 

villagers  were  set  apart  to  ferry  the  dead,  must  have  been  tha 
shores  of  Britain  known  to  them  ;  and  therefore  in  the  popular 
mythology  of  our  near  neighbours  our  island  must  have  been 
altogether  a  home  of  the  dead.1  And  something  of  this 
superstition  long  attached  to  us — the  land  of  the  Angli  was 
in  later  centuries  confused  with  the  home  of  the  Angeli.2  If, 
however,  we  limit  ourselves  strictly  to  the  myth  as  given  by 
Procopius,  it  is  only  the  country  beyond  the  wall,  i.e.,  the 
Roman  Wall,  that  has  so  ghastly  a  reputation.  Granting,  I 
mean,  that  this  wild  myth  concerning  '  Brittia '  could  never 
have  sprung  up  save  when  our  island  and  our  Roman  roads 
were  cut  off  from  the  great  system  of  Europe ;  still  it  was  not 
so  wild  as  quite  to  forget  the  difference  between  conquered 
Britain  and  those  unknown  unconquered  regions  in  the  far 
north.  It  was  at  the  wall  where  the  Roman  roads  came  to  an 
end,  that  all  that  was  natural  and  human  too,  ended,  and  we 
approached  the  borders  of  the  Earth.  This  region  beyond  the 
wall  is  that  same  Caledonia  which  one  of  its  own  chieftains 
was  made  by  Tacitus  to  speak  of  as  the  end  of  all  territories 
and  of  all  freedom. 

Such  was,  I  deem,  the  attitude  in  which  the  Roman  subject 
stood — not  to  all  the  rest  of  the  world — but  to  those  parts  of 
Northern  Europe  which  lay  outside  the  domains  of  Rome. 
To  the  commoner  people,  at  any  rate,  all  those  regions  were 
strange,  misformed,  monstrous,  inhuman,  ghostlike.  And 
when  Christianity  walked  along  the  paths  which  had  been  pre- 
pared for  her  by  Rome,  Christendom,  too,  looked  upon  this 
part  of  the  unchristian  world  in  the  same  way.  In  time,  as 
Christianity  cast  her  net  over  many.people  beyond  the  Roman 
pale,  they  began  to  look  with  her  eyes,  and  to  regard  as  she 
did    their    unconverted    brethren.      That    feeling    has   been 

1  "As  the  passage  of  Claudian  likewise  suggests. 

*  Dudo,  De  mar.  et  act.  prim.  due.  Normannia,  ii.  5. 


ROME  AND  NOT-ROME.  7 

crystallized  and  preserved  (by  chance  partly,  no  doubt)  in  our 
word,  heathen,  the  German  Heide,  from  heath,  Heide.  Partly 
by  chance,  because  heath  at  one  time  might  mean  an  enclosure 
in  the  country,  heathen  be  no  more  than  a  translation  of  the 
Latin  paga?ius,  villager.  But  the  earliest  signification  of  heath 
was  very  soon  forgotten,  and  the  word  very  soon  came  to  mean 
what  it  means  with  us,  a  moor,  a  wild,  uncouth,  uncultivated 
region,  remote  from  human  kind.  The  associations  in  popular 
imagination  with  all  such  places  were  necessarily  far  more 
terrible  than  they  are  with  us  :  what  was  unknown  was  always 
then  uncouth,  that  is  to  say,  monstrous,  terrifying. 

The  German  races,  though  they  were,  as  compared  to  the 
classical  peoples,  essentially  rustics,  had  in  their  minds  as  vivid 
a  picture  of  the  horror  of  deserted  regions  as  any  that  speaks 
in  classical  poetry.  Side  by  side  with  that  myth  of  the  Gauls 
about  Britain,  side  by  side  with  the  above-quoted  passage  from 
Claudian,  or  even  with  the  more  awful  vstcvia  of  the  Odyssey 
which  suggested  it,  we  might  place  some  pictures  drawn  from 
our  earliest  poem  Beowulf,  of  that  arch-heathen  Grendel,  and 
of  the  land  in  which  he  dwelt.  I  call  him  an  arch-heathen, 
for  he  is  the  embodiment  of  all  terrors  attaching  to  the 
moors  and  misty  fells,  the  marshes  and  the  dark  peat- 
pools,  to  whatever,  in  fact,  lay  far-off  from  human  dwellings. 
He  himself  is  a  ghoul  or  a  giant,  a  giant  just  of  the  same  kind 
as  the  giant  of  our  folk-tales;  only  that  unfortunately  we 
cannot  realize  what  likeness  such  beings  put  on  in  days  when 
men  really  believed  in  their  existence.  There  is  a  giant  in  the 
Edda  called  Hraesvelg,  Corpse  devourer  :  Grendel,  too,  feeds  on 
human  flesh ;  he  lives  far  from  mankind  in  the  dwellings  of 
the  Fifel-race  ;  but  at  night  he  stalks  along  under  the  misty 
hills,  till  he  comes  to  men's  habitations,  where  he  can  find 
some  food  for  his  cannibal  mouth, 


8  HE  A  THENDOM. 

Came  from  the  moor,  under  the  misty  hills, 
Grendel  stalking.   .   .   . 

He  bare  'God's  anger  on  him,'  so  writes  our  poet,  a  Chris- 
tian telling  a  heathen  legend.1 

We  have,  then,  in  Beowulf,  and  its  picture  of  Grendel,  the 
due  counterpart  of  Procopius'  imagery.  That  stands  to  us  for 
the  type  of  a  place  cut  off  from  intercourse  with  Rome,  a 
heathendom  before  Christianity,  we  might  say  ;  this  stands  to 
us  for  any  place  cut  off  from  intercourse  with  humankind, 
and  in  a  spiritual  sense  it  typifies  the  idea  of  heathendom 
generally,  as  the  descendants  of  the  heathens  themselves  con- 
ceived it. 

The  Goths  had  another  myth  which  illustrates  the  same 
thought.  It  is  reported  by  the  Christian  Goth  Jordanes — in 
days  when  the  Gothic  nation  had  all  been  Christianized — and 
relates  to  those  beings  of  fear,  the  heathen  Huns.  Jordanes 
tells  us  that  a  former  king  of  the  Goths  had  banished  from 
his  dominions  all  the  sorceresses,2  that  these  had  gone  east- 
ward and  found  a  home  in  a  certain  wood. 3  -There  they 
cohabited  with  the  wild  beasts  of  the  forest,  and  out  of  this 
unnatural  connection  sprang  the  obscene  race  of  the  Huns.* 

In  every  legend  such  as  this  the  feeling  which  underlies  it  is 
the  same;  it  is  the  horror  which  mankind  universally  conceives 
of  all  that  is  mysterious  and  unknown.  The  description  in 
Beowulf  might  have  been  written  with  equal  force  if  the  poem 
had  been  a  purely  heathen  one  ;  and  the  story  which  Jordanes 
retails  may  very  well  have  had  its  origin  in  heathen  days.  It  is 
only  that  Christendom  adopted  this  strain  of  popular  superstition 

1  Compare  the  epithets  hraundrengr,  hraunbi'ii,  frequently  applied  to 
giants  in  the  Edda  (as  in  Haustlong,  HymiskviSa,  &c.),  also  bergbm ', 
hellisbui.  2   '  Haliorunas.' 

3  This  wood  is  the  JduiviSr  (Iron  wood)  of  the  Eddas.  Cf.  Rydberg, 
Teutonic  Mythology,  p.  151.  4  Jordanes,  De  Goth.    Orig,  c.  24. 


GERMANY.  9 

and  applied  it  to  the  part  of  the  world  to  which  it  was  specially 
applicable — that  is  to  say,  the  heathen  north.  It  would  have 
been  absurd  to  speak  of  the  classical  pagans  in  such  a  manner. 
No  one  could  think  of  the  descendants  of  Pericles,  or  the 
possessors  of  the  primeval  wisdom  of  the  East  as  a  wild,  half- 
human  people,  haunting  the  ways  of  wolves.  Thus  heathen, 
when  we  apply  the  word  to  the  unconverted  northern  nations, 
Germans  or  Scandinavians,  has  a  meaning  quite  distinct  from 
that  of  pagan,  as  the  word  wras  used  in  the  early  days  of 
Christianity.  And  as  paganism  was  pretty  well  disposed  of 
before  Christianity  came  in  contact  with  heathenism,  and 
Christianity  itself  had  changed  in  the  interval,  the  attitude  of 
Heathendom  and  Christendom  f  ce  to  face  with  one  another 
is  a  thing  to  be  studied  in  and  by  itself,  not  confounded  in  one 
long  history  of  the  spread  of  Christianity  over  Europe. 

No  time  would  be  wasted  which  should  help  us  to  gain  that 
sense  of  the  unknown  in  space  which  our  forefathers  could 
possess,  but  which  is  so  strange  to  modern  thought.  In  vain 
the  philosopher  tells  us  that  our  life  is  hemmed  round  with 
mystery  ;  it  is  the  physical  expression  of  this  mystery  that  we 
require,  in  order  to  realize  the  ideas  of  former  ages  on  this 
matter.  To  think  that  nothing  known  lies  beyond  such  a  wood, 
that  that  far  headland  bounds  the  world  of  men ;  could  that 
be  possible  to  us  in  the  present  day,  then  we  might  have  some 
conception  of  what  heathen  and  its  cognate  words  would  mean 
to  a  Christian  of  the  early  Middle  Ages.  And  we  should 
through  this  knowledge  also  be  half-way  towards  an  under- 
standing of  the  conflict  which  had  to  go  on  in  the  heathen 
German's  own  soul  before  he  could  bring  himself  to  cast  out 
his  early  gods  to  wander  through  such  desolate  places  ;  as  Odin 
(Wuotan)  and  his  following  were  cast  out  to  become  fiends, 
the  Wild  Huntsman  and  his  crew  ;  or  as  the  same  god  was  left 
alone  upon  the  Harz  transformed  into  the  Prince  of  Darkness. 


io  HEATHENDOM, 

Such  a  conflict  went  on  in  each  mind ;  and  the  epos  of  this 
mental  struggle  is  typefied  by  the  epos  of  visible  warfare  between 
Heathendom  and  Christendom,  whereof  again  the  battles  and 
sitges  of  the  first  Viking  Age  (our  more  special  study  in  this 
volume)  form  in  the  mass  a  single  act.  The  details  of  this 
warfare  are  often  very  difficult  to  ascertain,  and  seem  common- 
place and  uninteresting.  But  the  conflict  as  a  whole  in  its 
inward  and  outward  phases  was  stupendous,  and  stupendous 
in  its  results. 

II. 

We  have  been  in  a  position  to  see  how  there  was,  in  a  certain 
sense,  a  heathendom  before  Christianity.  Every  northern 
country  which  was  cut  off  from  connection  with  Rome  (as 
Britannia  was  for  a  time)  sank  at  once  into  this  tenebrous  con- 
dition. And  all  those  lands  whither  the  Roman  roads  had 
never  reached  and  the  Roman  rule  had  never  spread,  dwelt  in 
it  perpetually.  Such  a  land  was  Caledonia  beyond  the  wall ; 
sich  was  Ierne,  *  gelid  Ierne,'  as  a  Roman  poet  miscalls  the 
land  of  warm  mists  and  rains,  a  land  which  Agricola  thought 
of  conquering,  but  where,  in  fact,  the  Roman  arms  had  never 
been  seen.  But  the  true  home  of  this  heathenism  before 
Christianity  (as  of  the  heathenism  after  Christianity)  lay  not 
in  these  western  extremities  of  the  world,  but  in  the  eastern 
ones,  in  all  the  great  German  Germany  beyond  the  Rhine, 
and  in  the  Baltic  c*  untries  of  which  the  Romans  had  so  faint 
a  notion. 

There  was  a  Roman  Germany.  First,  those  provinces  south 
of  the  Danube  whereof  we  have  spoken,  Rhoetia,  Noricum — 
now,  roughly  speaking,  Wiirtemburg,  Bavaria,  Carinthia,  German 
Austria,  Styria.  There  were  the  Decumates  Agri(the  'Tithe 
Lands '),  which  correspond  with  the  modern  Grand  Duchy  of 
Baden,  and  a  small  part  of  Wurtcmberg.     In  that  region  there 


ROMAN  GERMANY.  n 

was  another  wall  of  Hadrian,  a  vallum  protected  by  a  series 
of  forts  which  ran  due  west  from  Albensberg  on  the  Danube 
(a  little  above  Regensburg),  and  was  joined  eventually  by  the 
wall  of  Trajan,  running  due  north  beyond  the  Main  to  the 
slopes  of  t»he  Taunus.  At  this  last  range  of  mountains,  for  all 
the  land  east  of  the  Rhine,  begins  unconquered  Germany.  You 
may  stand  to  day  and  look  across  towards  those  Taunus  hills 
from  Mainz  or  Worms,  across  that  great  plain  which  was  once 
the  Rhine's  bed,  and  which  since  history  dawned  has  been  the 
battlefield  of  so  many  nationalities  and  so  many  creeds;  while 
a  clear,  star-lit  sky  is  over  your  head  you  will  see,  maybe,  as 
I  have  seen,  over  there  the  flashes  of  sheet-lightning  and  hear 
the  faint  echoes  of  thunder.  The  sight  of  these  hills,  the  roll 
of  that  thunder,  cannot  be  without  a  deep  significance  for  any 
traveller  whose  mind  is  in  the  least  degree  imbued  with  the 
lessons  of  history.  The  hills  are  for  him  a  symbol  of  the 
beginning  of  the  reign  of  Thorr  and  Odin.  Of  deeper  sig- 
nificance still  perhaps  is  another  mountain  range  which  lies 
farther  to  the  north  and  to  the  east.  This  is  the  Harz,  which 
gave,  I  suppose,  its  name  to  the  Cherusci,  the  great  champions 
of  heathendom  before  Christianity.  And  we  know  what  a 
reputation  the  Harz  preserved  all  through  the  Middle  Ages 
as  the  hearth  on  which  smouldered  the  last  embers  of 
heathenism  after  Christianity  as  it  died  away  in  witchcraft. 
West  of  the  Rhine  lay  two  Roman  Germanias,  Germania 
Superior  and  Germania  Inferior,  the  precursors  of  Alsace  and 
Lorraine,  that  is  to  say,  of  Alsace  and  the  greater  Lorraine 
of  early  Middle  Age  history.  To  protect  this  Roman  Germany 
were  built  the  great  camps  or  founded  the  great  cities  and 
colonies  which  lay  along  the  banks  of  the  stream  or  a  little 
way  behind  it.  There  was  Treves  (Augusta  Treverorum)  the 
most  important  of  all.  There  was  Castra  Vetera  on  the  Rhine 
itself,  the  chief  of  the  Roman  camps,  but  one  of  the  few  places 


I2  HEATHENDOM. 

which  did  not  preserve  its  importance  into  Christian  days  ; 
there  was  Colonia  Ubiorum,  or  Colonia  Agrippina,  what  we 
call  Cologne  ;  Moguntiacum  (Mainz) ;  Argentoratum  (Strass- 
hurg) ;  Vangiones  (Worms),  '  celebrated,'  a  Roman  historian 
complacently  says,  c  for  many  a  defeat  of  the  barbarians  ' — 
there  is  no  need  to  enumerate  them  all.  Truth  to  tell,  almost 
all  the  picturesque  medieval  towns  which  the  traveller  of  to-day 
knows  (knows  and  loves)  along  the  banks  of  the  Rhine,  Bonn, 
Remagen,  Andernach,  Oberwesel,  Coblentz,  and  the  rest1  have 
had  a  Roman  origin.  In  Christian  days  the  greater  of 
these  military  strongholds  grew  to  be  likewise  strongholds 
of  the  faith,  archbishops'  and  bishops'  sees ;  the  three  greatest 
archbishoprics  of  Germany,  the  three  great  spiritual  elec- 
torates, Treves,  Cologne,  and  Mainz,  were  all  in  this  region 
of  Roman  Germania.  Over  against  these  strongholds  stood 
in  imperial  days  the  wild  forest  haunts  of  the  Germans,  the 
Taunus  or  the  Teutoberger  Wald,  places  which  were  pregnant 
with  great  events. 

There  is  one  other  river  of  Germany,  one  other  river  in 
Europe  only,  one  may  say,  which  has  been  fortified  as  a 
rampart  against  heathendom  much  as  the  Rhine  has  been. 
This  river  is  the  Vistula.  Along  all  its  banks  which  are  German 
you  find  the  fortified  towns  or  convent  fortresses,  raised  in  the 
thirteenth  century  by  the  Teutonic  knights  as  a  bulwark,  not 
now  against  heathen  Germans,  but  against  heathen  Slavs. 
Marienburg,  Marienwerder,  Graudentz,  Culm,  Thorn,  are  the 
counterparts  of  Colonia  Agrippina,  Bonna,  Confluentes, 
Moguntiacum,  Argentoratum,  and  the  rest.  Only  there  is  this 
difference,  that  whereas  the  greater  number  of  the  Roman 
forts  upon  the  Rhine  which  Christendom  inherited  are  upon 
the  west  bank,  the  fortresses  of  the  Vistula  stood  within  the 

1  Bonna  (Ara  Ubiorum),  Rigomagus,  Antunacum,  Vosavia,  Confluentes. 


GERMAN  WARFARE.  13 

heathen   territory   and   defended    the    river    already    won    by 
Christendom. 

Beyond  the  boundaries,  as  we  have  traced  them,  of  Roman 
empire  you  came  tc  that  land  which  the  historian  spoke  of, 
in  words  which  have  been  quoted  a  thousand  times,  as  in 
universum,  on  the  whole,  either  rugged  with  forest  or  dank 
with  marshes,  where  people  did  not  dwell  together  in  towns, 
nostro  ?nore,  but  apart  and  scattered.  Many  centuries  later 
it  was  said  of  the  territory  of  the  Saxons  (between  the  Lower 
Rhine  and  the  Elbe)  that  there  a  squirrel  might  travel  for 
leagues  ('  seven  leagues ')  without  ever  having  need  to  touch 
the  ground.  These  dark  and  trackless  forests  had  a  terror 
of  their  own.  Two  things,  says  a  recent  writer,1  were,  during 
their  efforts  to  conquer  Germany,  strange  and  terrible  to  the 
Roman  generals  and  the  Roman  legionaries — the  Ocean  with 
its  tides  and  the  endless  stretches  of  dark  woodland  in  the 
interior.  Upon  the  one  the  ships  were  suddenly,  as  if  by 
unseen  hands,  dragged  from  their  moorings,  hurried  away, 
and  tossed  upon  some  rocky  shore.  In  the  other,  as  the 
legions  were  painfully  struggling  through  the  dense  forest,  not 
less  suddenly,  and  again  at  the  touch  of  unseen,  but  not 
superhuman,  hands,  the  trees  would  begin  falling  to  right  and 
left  and  rear  of  the  army,  a  network  of  fallen  trees.  They  had 
been  half  felled  through  days  before  in  anticipation  of  the 
advance.  As  the  Romans  pressed  forward  they  were  suddenly 
brought  face  to  face  with  a  huge  abatis — broti  it  was  called 
in  Northern  warfare.  Behind  it  the  enemy  were  entrenched  ; 
arrows  and  javelins  began  to  fly  out  from  behind  the  impro- 
vised stockade ;  the  broti  stretched  great  wings  far  into  the 
forest ;  if  this  were  carried  by  assault  you  came  upon  another 
and  another,   and  the   enemy  scarcely  visible  all   the   while. 

x  Vigfusson,  Grimm  Centenary,  ii. 


i4  HEATHENDOM. 

Meantime  other  trees  had  been  falling,  falling,  and  fresh 
abatis  had  been  growing  up  on  other  sides  and  to  the  rear 
to  cut  off  all  retreat.  He  was  a  lucky  or  a  very  skilful  general 
who  could  bring  his  army  out  thence  unbroken.  Perhaps 
he  had  been  wise  enough  to  post  supports  to  come  up  at  the 
critical  moment ;  if  they  could  reach  him,  he  was  saved ;  if 
they  failed  to  reach  him  he  was  destroyed.  This  is  how 
Caesar  was  saved  the  day  he  overcame  the  Nervii,1  and  this 
is  how  Varus  was  destroyed. 

Another  favourite  method  of  defence  among  the  Germans 
was  by  means  of  trenches.2  Sometimes  they  were  mere  traps 
into  which  an  advancing  line  might  precipitate  itself;  some- 
times they  concealed  an  ambush.  Add  to  these  terrors  the 
wild  and  fearful  howling,  more  like  that  of  beasts  than  of  men, 3 
which  echoed  and  re-echoed  in  the  forest  wilderness,  and  we 
have  a  picture  of  some  of  the  physical  terrors  which  dogged 
the  advance  of  the  Romans  into  this  ancient  land. 

But  we  should,  I  think,  be  estimating  very  wrongly  if, 
because  these  difficulties  were  never  overcome,  we  were  to 
assume  that  they  w^ere  insurmountable,  or  that  they  were  felt 
to  be  so  by  the  Romans  either  of  Augustus'  or  of  Tacitus's 
day.     A  few  chance  sayings  of  the  Roman   historians  have 

1  Not  of  course  that  the  land  of  the  Nervii  lay  in  that  special  region 
of  '  heathen  '  Germany  of  which  we  are  speaking,  for  their  territory  was 
by  the  Scheldt.  But  they  were  a  German  people,  and,  like  their  brethren 
to  the  east  and  north,  made  use  of  something  like  brotis  in  their  battles — 
only  that  their  stockades  were  more  like  hedges  and  made  of  smaller 
trees.  '  Nervii  .  .  .  teneris  arboribus  incisis  atque  inflexis,  crebris  in 
iatitudinem  ramis  et  rubis  sentibusque  interjectis,  effecerant  ut  instar  mnri 
hoe  sepes  munimenta  proeberent,  quo  non  modo  intrari  sed  ne  perspici 
quidem  posset.'  And  later, '  Sepibus  densissimis,  ut  ante  demonstravimus, 
interjectis,  prospectus  impediretur  ;  neque  certa  subsidia  conlocari,  neque 
quaque  parte  opus  esset  provided/ &c.  Bell.  Gall.  ii.  17,  22.  Cf.  Tacitus, 
Antral,  i.  63  ;  Ammian.  xvi.  it,  8  ;  xvii.  1,  9  ;   10,  6. 

3  See  Ammian.  xvi.  12,  27  ;  xvii.  1,  8,  9. 

3  Plutarch,  Marius  16,  for  the  Cimbri  and  Teutones.  Cf.  Tacitus, 
Annal.  i.  65,  &c. 


ROME'S  RELATION  TO  HER  NEIGHBOURS.       15 

been    exaggerated    by   our  vanity  as  Teutons    and   made   to 
receive  this  interpretation.     It  is  rather  the  opposiie  of  this 
feeling   which   we   have   to   try  and   realize.     It   is  not  easy 
for  us  who  have  been  made  wise  by  the  event  to  understand 
how  low  a  place  the  nations  of  Northern  Europe  held  then 
in    the  estimation   of  civilized    mankind.     Our  thoughts   are 
naturally  turned  to  the  future,  but  theirs  were  necessarily  con- 
cerned only  with  the  past,  that  is  to  say,  with  the  remains  of 
Alexander's  Empire  in  the  south  and  east,  with  the  vast  field 
of  Hellenistic  culture  in  Asia  and  Africa.     '  Who,'  as  Tacitus 
says,  'would  ever  leave  Asia  and   Africa  for  those  inclement 
Northern  lands?'     The  Romcns  had   few  thoughts  to  spare 
for  the  people  whose  small,  one-roomed,  wooden  huts  lay  scat- 
tered among  the  German  forests,   or  for  those  wilder  people 
still,  perhaps,  of  Caledonia  and  Ierne.     India  was  far  more 
interesting  to  them  than  heathen  Germany  or  the  flat  lands 
at  the  mouth  of  the  Rhine.     The  way  Tacitus  speaks  of  even 
the  Gauls  is  very  much  the  way  we  speak  of  the  Hindus,  or, 
at  any  rate,  of  the  Mohammedans  of  India — as  of  a  people 
who,   no  doubt,  once  were  powerful,  but  whose  day  is  over, 
and  who  are  now  sunk  irretrievably  in  idleness  and  effeminacy. 
The  same  historian  tells  us  how  little  the  rebellion  of  Civilis — 
which  arose  on  the  Batavian  island,  and  nearly  lost  to  Rome 
Northern  Gaul  and  the  province  of  Germania  Inferior — was 
noticed  amid  the  excitement  of  civil  dissensions    in    Italy.1 
It  would  be  no  unjust  comparison  to  liken  that  rebellion  to 
an  abortive  Indian  mutiny,  had  such  an  one  been  set  on  foot 
by  Sikhs  and    Nepiule  e.     Agricola's    campaigns    in    Britain 
we  might  compare  to   the  taking  of  Scinde.     By  such  com- 
parisons only  can  we  arrive  at  some  notion  of  the  relation  in 
which  Rome  stood  to  her  northern  subjects  and  neighbours. 

1  Historia,  lib.  iv. 


T6  HEATHENDOM. 

Germany  again — unconquered  Germany,  the  Germany  of 
Tacitus  —  we  must  compare  to  Afghanistan,  and  the  great 
defeat  of  Varus  to  the  destruction  of  General  Sale's  force 
in  the  Kyber.  The  circumstances  of  the  two  defeats  were 
not  dissimilar,  and  their  consequences  were  almost  identical. 
Each  begot  in  the  mind  of  the  greater  nation  something 
of  a  superstitious  fear,  an  almost  superstitious  exaggeration 
of  the  dangers  which  lay  in  wait  for  the  invader.  The 
policy  of  Augustus  that  the  Rhine  should  form  the  boundary 
of  the  Roman  Empire  was  identical  with  our  dominant 
policy  in  respect  to  Afghanistan,  with  no  more  and  no  less 
of  reason  for  the  one  course  than  for  the  other.  The  forest 
warfare  of  Germany  was  difficult,  as  we  have  said ;  the  woods, 
the  brotis,  the  swampy  ground,  lay  in  wait  for  the  legions 
and  auxiliaries,  as  the  Kyber  or  the  Bolan  lay  in  wait  for  our 
men.  But  I  do  not  think  it  can  be  seriously  maintained  that 
in  the  one  case  or  in  the  other  there  was  anything  like  an 
insuperable  difficulty  in  the  way  of  conquest.  It  was  not 
a  reasonable,  but  far  more  a  superstitious,  fear  which  held  back 
the  Roman  arms. 

Drusus  seemed  born  to  play  the  part  of  Clive  to  this 
unco,  quered  world.  He  made  a  fleet  to  sail  upon  the 
German  Ocean,1  the  first  that  ever  dared  its  fitful  tides.  But, 
alas,  this  fleet  was  destroyed  by  the  treacherous  ebb  and 
flood :  Germanicus  suffered  a  like  misadventure.  During  the 
commands  of  Drusus  and  Tiberius  in  Germany  the  Roman 
ramparts  extended  some  way  beyond  the  Rhine.  Aliso,  a 
strong  fort  on  the  Lippe  (near  the  modern  Paderborn),  seemed 
to  cover  all  the  country  between  the  Rhine  and  the  Ems. 
Drusus  cut  a  canal,   navigable  by  his  fleet,  from  the  former 

1  '  Usque  ad  obis  extremum,'  Augustus  says  in  his  proclamation.  Pliny 
says  he  went  to  the  extremity  of  the  Cimbric  Chersonese  H.  N.  ii.  67  ; 
but  this  is  improbable  ;  cf.  Bunbury,  Anc.  Geog.  ii.  190. 


DRUSUS  AND  TIBERIUS  IN  GERMANY.  17 

river,  through  Friesland,  to  the  ocean.  Tiberius  crossed  the 
Weser  and  advanced  as  far  as  the  Elbe.  But  after  the  '  Great 
Defeat '  of  Varus,  Augustus  undid  their  work  and  commanded 
the  Rhine  to  flow  as  the  boundary  of  the  empire. 

It  may  have  been  a  sound  policy  x  or  it  may  have  been  a 
political  superstition  that  governed  the  emperor's  decision  in 
this  case  ;  but  it  was  not  any  pressing  danger,  nor  even  any 
insuperable  difficulty  in  the  way  of  a  conquest  of  Germany. 

In  the  popular  mind,  for  the  common  soldier  or  for  the 
chance  merchant  adventuring  into  these  territories,  there  would 
mingle,  I  doubt  not,  an  element  of  superstition  not  political, 
connected  with  this  land  of  enchantments.  There  the  divine 
power  dwelt  unseen  in  the  midst  of  awful  groves ;  the  women 
of  this  race  were  wonderfully  given  to  the  study  of  magic  and 
enchantments.  Is  it  not  rather  strange  that  the  only  pure  relics 
of  heathen  Germany  which  have  come  down  to  us  are  in  the 
form  of  two  incantations?2  As  the  camp  story  went,  when 
Drusus  had  made  his  march  over  the  Weser,  and  threatened 
the  Elbe,  one  of  these  wise  women,  these  Volvas,  cast  her 
spells  upon  him  ;  as  a  gigantic  female  figure — the  figure  of 
German/a  personified — she  appeared  to  him  in  a  dream  and 
warned  him  to  turn  back.  He  did  so  ;  but  still  fate  overtook 
him  ;  he  had  a  fall  from  his  horse  and  died  within  the  year. 
And  almost  from  that  time  forward  the  empire  of  Rome  beyond 
the  Rhine  began  to  shrink.  It  reached  the  limits  of  its  flood 
when  Tiberius  in  his  fleet  sailed  to  the  mouth  of  the  Elbe  and 
there  joined  hands  with  an  army  which  had  marched  thither 
overland,  and  awed  the  Germans  upon  the  other  bank  so  that 
they  dared  not  attack. 3     It  then  began  to  ebb.     As  Tacitus 

1  Mommsen,  Provinces  of  the  Roman  Empire,  trans.,  i.  54.  Cf.  Tacitus, 
Annal.  i.  11.  2  See  Chapter  XVI. ;  and  cf.  Germ.  10. 

3  Twenty  years,  A.U.C  742-762,  we  may  reckon  the  duration  of  this 
extended  Roman  Empire  in  Northern  Germany,  of  which  Aliso  was  the 
capital.     See  Mommsen,  Provinces,  i.  367. 


18  HEA  THENDOM. 

writes  :  *The  Elbe  which  formerly  we  knew,  we  now  know  by 
report  only.' 

We  have  already  seen  how  some  four  centuries  later  the 
flood  of  empire  ebbed  from  Britain,  and  ghosts  and  the  crea- 
tures of  popular  superstition  came  in  to  occupy  its  room. 

III. 

In  the  region  beyond  the  Elbe,  where  the  Romans  never 
set  foot,  we  might  expect  to  lie  the  very  strongholds  of 
what  I  have  called  pre-Christian  heathendom,  the  ancient 
beliefs  of  Germany  which  knew  no  touch  of  foreign  in- 
fluence. There  the  great  confederation  of  the  Suevi  stretched 
from  the  shores  of  the  Baltic  down  almost  to  the  border 
of  the  Roman  provinces  in  Southern  Germany.  It  is  from 
among  the  Suevi  of  Northern  Germany1  that  come  the 
few  and  slight  pictures  which  Tacitus  is  able  to  draw  for 
us  of  the  religion  of  Germany  in  his  day.  Somewhere  be- 
tween the  Elbe  and  the  Oder,  in  the  territory  of  the  Suevian 
Semnones — maybe  on  the  site  of  the  Spreewald,  where  there 
survives  to-day  a  people  who  seem  to  belong  to  a  bygone 
heathen  past — stood  that  grove,  the  most  sacred  in  all 
Germany,  where  it  was  believed  that  the  great  god  of  the 
Teutonic  nations  had  been  born.  This  great  god  is  without 
question  the  Wuotan  or  Odin  of  later  times,  a  divinity  who, 

1  The  earliest  distinction  among  the  nationalities  of  Teutonic  origin  was 
probably  between  those  of  the  Eastern  Baltic  and  of  the  great  sandy  plain  of 
North  Germany  and  the  Germans  of  the  west— the  Harz,  the  Thuringian, 
and  Teutoberger  Forests,  &c. — who  came  into  contact  more  or  less  with 
Rome.  The  Scandinavians,  if  we  are  to  judge  by  early  Runic  inscriptions, 
were  closely  allied  in  language  to  the  Germans  of  the  Vistula  (Goths). 
On  the  other  hand,  craniologically  the  Danes  are  very  different  from  the 
Swedes  and  Norsemen.  Judging  by  place-names  we  should  say  that  the 
whole  of  Roman  Germany  v\as  originally  Celtic,  and  even  a  large  part  of 
Germany  which  was  never  Roman.  Harz,  for  example,  is  probably  a  Celtic 
word.  It  is  obvious,  therefore,  that  the  Suevic  confederation  comprehended 
many  people  not  ethnologically  very  nearly  allied. 


TACITUS  ON  THE  RELIGION  OF  THE  GERMANS.  19 

whether  or  not  he  were  the  actual  personification  of  the  wind, 
had  all  the  character  of  a  god  of  tempests.  To  him  alone 
among  the  German  gods  were  human  sacrifices  offered. 
Tacitus  tells  us  that  they  were  offered  in  this  grove.  It  was 
so  holy  a  place  that  none  might  enter  it  but  with  a  chain 
round  his  neck  to  show  his  subjection  to  the  divinity.  If  a 
man  fell  down  while  in  the  wood  he  might  not  raise  himself  or 
be  raised  up  again  ;  he  must  crawl  out  on  hands  and  knees. 

Another  picture  still  more  impressive  belongs  to  some  of  the 
Suevi  farther  to  the  north,  whose  territory  lay  upon  the  shore 
of  the  Baltic — very  likely  to  the  modern  Mecklenburg  and  to 
the  island  of  Rugen.  This  picture  is  of  the  worship  of  the 
chief  female  divinity,  as  the  other  of  the  chief  male ;  her  name 
was  Nerthus  or  Mother  Earth.  Her  home  was  in  an  island  of 
the  Baltic  by  the  side  of  a  lake  surrounded  by  a  wood. 
Every  year  she  was  brought  out  of  this  secret  place,  ferried 
over  to  the  mainland,  and  there  in  a  car  drawn  by  white  oxen 
she  made  her  progress  through  the  territories  of  her  worshippers. 
None  saw  her  face ;  her  car  was  shrouded  by  rich  tapestries, 
and  none  but  her  priest  might  approach  it.  The  picture 
is  almost  like  that  of  the  Ark  of  the  Lord  when  it  was 
brought  out  to  the  armies  of  Israel.1  But  there  is  this 
difference  in  the  two  pictures — that  whereas  the  latter  came 
forth  as  an  ensign  of  war,  Nerthus,  wherever  she  travelled,  was 
an  emissary  of  peace. 

1  Happy  is  the  place,  joyful  the  day  which  is  honoured  by 
the  entertainment  of  such  a  guest.  No  wars  can  go  on,  no 
arms  are  borne,  the  sword  rests  in  its  scabbard.  This  peace 
and  rest  continue  till  the  priest  takes  back  the  goddess,  satiate 
of  converse  with  mortals.'  Yet  even  in  this  picture  of  primi- 
tive and  simple  rustic  rites  there  lingered  a  something  terrible. 

1  It  is  also  like  that  of  the  earperitum  as  used  in  the  later  ritual  of  Ancient 
Rome,  but  which  had  no  place  in  1  lie  Dritnitive  ritual. 


20  HE  A  THENDOM. 

When  the  goddess  returned  to  her  island,  the  l  chariot,  the 
veil,  and  if  you  like  to  believe  it,  the  goddess  herself,  are 
washed  in  a  secret  lake  by  slaves  who  immediately  after  are 
them- elves  drowned  therein.  Hence  comes  a  mysterious 
horror  and  a  holy  ignorance  of  what  has  taken  place,  for  that 
is  beheld  only  by  men  who  are  themselves  immediately  to 
perish.'  * 

Of  the  northern  parts  of  Germany,  Tacitus  can  tell  us  little 
more  than  is  contained  in  these  two  fragments  of  its  creed.  We 
have  just  the  names  of  some  of  the  people  who  dwelt  east  of 
the  Suevi  along  the  southern  shore  of  the  Baltic  ;  of  these  the 
Guttones,  dwelling  by  the  mouth  of  the  Vistula,  were,  we  may 
believe,  the  fathers  of  the  famous  Goths,  and  the  most  nearly 
allied  of  all  the  German  nations  to  the  Scandinavians  of  later 
history.  In  truth,  along  all  this  northern  stretch  of  Germany, 
from  the  Weser  to  the  Vistula,  we  should  find  in  these  early 
days  the  people  who  effected  most  towards  the  carving  out  of 
Mediaeval  Europe  from  the  remains  of  the  Roman  Empire;  the 
Lombards  between  the  Weser  and  the  Elbe,  the  Saxons  at  the 
foot  of  the  Cimbric  Chersonese;  the  Angli  north  of  them,  in 
Jutland  along  with  the  Jutes;  the  Burgundians,  not  close  to  the 
Baltic  shore,  but  in  Poland,  Prussian  and  Russian,  east  of  the 
Vistula;  and  finally  the  Goths  (we  may  believe)  in  East  Prussia. 
The  Franks  alone  among  the  greater  Teuton  races  are  wanting 
from  this  category.  And  the  Franks,  if  they  were  really  none 
other  than  the  ancient  Sigambri,  belonged  to  a  similar  and 
neighbouring  region,  the  flat  country  of  the  Lower  Rhine. 
When  we  first  catch  sight  of  them  they  are  settled  in  the  island 
of  Batavia,  the  low  island  at  the  mouth  of  the  Rhine  and  Saal, 
whence  their  name  Salic  Franks.2   To  Tacitus  and  the  Romans 

1  Tacitus,  Germ.  40. 

2  Those  higher  up  the  river,  the  Ripuarian  or  river-bank  Franks,  were 
in  the  ancient  land  of  the  Sigambri.      Nevertheless  the  Franks  are  not 


■  HERE  NA  TURE  ENDS*  2 1 

of  his  day  these  nations,  all  but  the  Sigambri,  were  little  more 
than  names.  Some  of  them,  he  tells  us,  were  conspicuous  for 
their  loyalty  to  their  kings — the  Western  Germans  being  more 
independent  and  republican. 

Finally,  we  come  to  the  Baltic  itself,  which  the  Romans  heard 
of  only  as  a  part  of  the  Northern  Ocean.  And  beyond  the  Baltic 
Tacitus  affords  us  one  slight  peep  into  the  Scandinavian  coun- 
tries— a  mere  glance,  but  one  not  wanting  in  impressiveness. 
On  the  other  side  of  that  sea,  he  says,  lies  the  island  of  the 
Suiones,  a  land  rich  in  arms  and  ships  and  men  ;  and  beyond 
the  Suiones'  land  another  sea,  '  sluggish  and  almost  stagnant, 
which  we  may  believe  girdles  and  encloses  the  whole  world. 
For  here  the  light  of  the  setting  sun  lingers  on  till  sunrise 
bright  enough  to  dim  the  light  of  the  stars.  More  than  that,  it 
is  asserted  that  the  sound  of  his  rising  is  to  be  heard,  and  the 
forms  of  the  gods  and  the  glory  round  his  head  may  be  seen. 
Only  thus  far,  and  here  rumour  seems  truth,  does  the  world 
extend.'' 

The  Cimbric  Chersonese  (Denmark),  moreover,  the  Latin 
writers  frequently  confounded  with  the  Homeric  land  of  the 
Cimmerians  at  the  edge  of  the  world.  Here,  then,  we  come  to 
the  true  counterparts  of  the  lands  upon  the  other  side  of  the 
North  Sea,  which  were  the  end  of  all  land  and  of  all  liberty 
And  if  the  importance  of  these  distant  territories  was  small  in 
the  eyes  of  the  Romans,  we  must  own  that  to  the  imagination 
of  those  days  an  interest  attached  to  them  which  it  is  no  longer 
possible  for  us  to  attribute  to  any  country.  It  is  impossible 
for  us  to  read  without  a  strange  emotion  the  passages  which 
speak  of  lands  like  these  supposed  to  lie  upon  the  very  borders 

to  be  classed  with  the  Low  German  stock  which  is  the  most  closely  allied 
to  the  Gothic,  nor  yet  with  the  true  High  German  Alamanni  and  Bavarians, 
but  with  Thuringians  (\leimu.n-di/ri)  as  Middle  German. 


22  HEATHENDOM. 

of  the  earth.  Illic  usque  tantum  Natura  ('  Here  nature  ends  '). 
It  is  a  tremendous  phrase. 

The  Scandinavian  '  island '  which  the  ancients  knew,  and 
which  they  called  sometimes  Scanzia,  sometimes  Scandia  J  or 
Scania,  sometimes  Scandinavia,  did  not  signify  the  whole  of 
the  Scandinavian  peninsula,  but  probably  only  that  lower 
bulge  of  Sweden,  part  of  which  still  bears  one  of  these  names, 
Scania,  Skane ;  while  another  name  has  been  extended  to 
include  a  vast  stretch  of  territory,  of  whose  existence  the 
Romans  had  no  idea. 

This  original  Scandinavia  (Skane,  Halland,  Smaland),  with 
Jutland  and  the  Danish  islands,  belongs  to  the  low-lying 
deeply-wooded  region  of  the  Baltic  shores  far  more  than  to 
upland  Sweden  and  Norway,  the  lands  farther  to  the  north, 
which  fall  away  from  the  great  backbone  of  Scandinavia. 
The  traveller  of  to-day,  who  passes  along  the  well-known  canal 
route  from  Gotenborg  to  Stockholm — the  most  familiar  of 
northern  highways — passes  not  far  from  the  dividing  line, 
between  the  Baltic  Lowlands  and  Scandinavia  Proper.  Geolo- 
gically speaking,  it  is  but  a  day  or  two  since  all  was  dry  land, 
where  now  lies  the  bed  of  the  Baltic;2  only  since  the  territory 
which  should  unite  the  Baltic  shores  sank  beneath  the  waves, 
the  forests  of  pine  and  birch  have,  over  a  great  part  of  the 
remaining  dry  land,  given  place  to  forests  of  hard-wood  trees, 
(hiefly  beech.  A  poet,  a  Hans  Andersen,  might  speak  of  the 
buried  lands  still  weeping  to  rejoin  their  brethren  who  feel  the 

1  Ptolemy  has  four  islands  of  Scandia,  one  large  and  three  very  small — 
the  Danish  islands,  or  possibly  Sweden,  Bornholm,  Oland,  and  Gottland, 
if  we  suppose  the  region  approached  from  the  Vistula. 

2  In  Skane  the  fossil  remains  of  many  animals  are  found,  which  must 
have  migrated  thither  from  the  south,  and  therefore  over  what  is  now  the 
bed  of  the  Baltic.  Skane  was,  in  the  Stone  and  Bronze  Ages,  much  more 
thickly  inhabited  than  any  other  part  of  Scandinavia,  while  the  country 
north  of  the  Dai-Elf  was  almost  uninhabited. 


THE  BALTIC.  23 

upper  air,  and  sending  up  through  the  water  golden  tears,  that 
amber,  namely,  which  is  such  a  noted  product  of  the  Baltic, 
and  has  brought  it  so  large  a  share  of  whatever  wealth  it  at  any 
time  has  gained. 

Amber  and  furs  were  the  staple  of  such  trade  as  existed 
between  the  Baltic  lands  and  Rome.  The  Swedes  are 
described  by  a  writer  of  late  Roman  days  as  great  hunters  of 
the  animals  valued  for  their  fur,  'whose  skins,'  says  our 
author,  '  find  their  way  through  countless  hands  to  Rome.'  It 
is  said  that  a  certain  knight  of  Nero's  day  was  the  first  Roman 
wrho  ever  looked  upon  the  Baltic.  He  was  a  civil,  peaceable 
knight,  engaged  in  the  amber  trade.1  But  we  ought  not  to 
omit  to  say  that,  according  to  one  theory,  there  was  in  much 
earlier  times  a  Greek  trade  to  the  Baltic  lands,  travelling  by  a 
more  easterly  route.  This,  mounting  the  Borysthenes  (Dnie- 
per), might  navigate  to  no  great  distance  from  the  sources 
either  of  the  Dwina  or  the  Vistula,  and  then  descending  these 
streams,  might  debouch  into  the  Baltic.  We  are  not  without 
evidence  in  support  of  this  theory  ;  and  it  is  quite  possible 
that  to  this  early  Greek  trade,  rather  than  to  the  Roman,  the 
Baltic  nations  were  indebted  for  the  most  priceless  of  all  gifts, 
the  gift  of  letters.2 

IV. 
Out  of  the  vast  ocean  which  covers  three  quarters  of  our 

1  Pliny,  Hist.  Nat.  xxxvii.  11.  Cf.  Bunbury,  Anc.  Geog.  i.  595.  Ukert 
Geog.  der.  G.  u.  R.  I.  ii.  307,  III.  i.  89,  ii.  5.  On  the  traces  of  a  trade 
route  down  the  Vistula  to  the  Baltic,  and  hence  to  Sweden,  especially  to 
islands  of  Gottland  and  Oland,  see  O.  Montelius,  Civilization  of  Sweden  in 
Heathen  Times  (tr.  of  Sue riges  Tom t id),  pp.  98,  99. 

2  Taylor,  hist,  of  Alphabet  and  Greeks  and  Goths ;  on  the  other  side 
see  L.  Wimmer  in  Aarbog-  for  Nordisk  Oldkyndighedy  1874.  Miillenhoff 
[Deutsche  Alterthumskunde,  i.  213-217),  says  that  the  Greeks  certainly  did 
not  get  their  amber  from  this  sea.  (It  is  well  known  there  are,  further, 
some  difficulties  attaching  to  the  translation  of  the  word  i'lXtKrpov,  at  any 
rate  before  the  time  of  Plato.) 


24  HEATHENDOM. 

globe  there  are  three  portions  connected  in  a  special  degree  with 
the  history  of  the  world.  The  first  is  the  Mediterranean,  on 
which  the  light  of  history  first  shines,  and  round  which  almost 
all  the  peoples  of  the  ancient  world  were  grouped — Egyptians, 
Phoenicians,  Hebrews,  Greeks,  Romans,  Carthaginians.  Very 
striking  is  it  to  see  the  dawn  of  history  breaking  over  that  sea, 
in  Egypt  first,  then  over  the  Eastern  shores,  passing  westward 
to  Greece  and  Italy  and  the  Mediterranean  coasts  of  Gaul,  and 
on  to  Spain.  The  third  of  these  ocean  regions  is  the  Atlantic, 
which,  as  we  know,  through  the  lands  to  which  it  leads  the 
way,  has  redressed  the  balance  of  the  Old  World.  But  the 
middle  region  is  certainly  the  Baltic,  which  is  a  sort  of  anti- 
thesis of  the  Mediterranean.  The  western  portion  of  the 
Baltic,  dotted  over  with  its  countless  isles,  which  seem  to  invite 
men  to  the  art  of  seafaring,  is  as  a  Northern  ^Egean  or  ant- 
yEgean  : x  for  as  the  ^Egean  was  the  first  sea  in  which  true 
history  begins,  so  the  Baltic  is  the  last  almost  of  European  seas 
to  which  that  light  has  reached.  We,  Angles  and  Saxons,  and 
even  the  Lombards  and  Burgundians,  may  look  upon  ourselves 
as  belonging  to  this  Baltic  region,  as  well  as  the  Goths,  and  the 
Scandinavian  nations  proper.  For  there  is  no  natural  boundary 
separating  the  different  peoples  of  the  great  northern  plain. 
Not  so  the  Hoch  Deutsch  people  who  were  so  long  in  contact 
with  Roman  civilization,  and  have  in  their  veins  so  large  an 
infusion  of  Roman  blood,  whose  country,  too,  is  utterly  different 
in  character  from  the  sandy  plain  of  the  north.2 

1  Compare  Munch's  remarks  on  the  Aitstrvegr  in  Not  she  7-ks.  Hist. 
i.  286. 

2  Many  changes  of  population  (and  still  more  of  the  names  of  the  popu- 
lation) took  place  between  the  Roman  possession  of  Rhsetia  and  Noricum 
and  the  tithe  lands,  and  the  re-appearance  of  these  districts  after  the  Frankish 
conquests  as  the  lands  of  the  Alamanni  and  Bajuvarians  (Baioarians,  Bava- 
rians). We  may,  however,  consider  these  true  Hoch  Deutsch  peoples  as 
more  deeply  affected  by  contact  with  Rome  than  any  other  part  of  the  Ger- 
man race.     The  history  of  these  peoples  is  almost  a  blank  between  the 


THE  SCANDINAVIAN  COUNTRIES.  25 

We  imagine  the  Scandinavian  lands  proper  as  desolate 
beyond  almost  all  other  lands  of  Europe  in  this  remote  past. 
And  yet  Tacitus  speaks  of  them  as  rich  in  arms  and  ships  and 
men.  With  regard  to  the  ships  there  is  no  doubt  he  is  right. 
There  must  have  existed  in  the  Baltic  countries  from  most 
antique  days,  certainly  for  as  much  as  five  hundred  years  before 
Tacitus's  day  an  art  of  ship-building.  For  on  certain  stone 
carvings — hallristingar,  hill-carvings,  as  they  are  called — 
found  in  Sweden  and  in  Denmark,  we  have  pictures  of  ships; 
and  the  pictures  here  presented  must  date  from  at  least  half  a 
millenium  before  Tacitus  wrote.1  The  boats  there  shown,  as 
far  as  we  can  judge  of  them,  nearly  answer  to  the  descriptions 
by  Tacitus  of  the  boats  in  use  on  the  Baltic  in  his  day ;  and 
curiously  enough  they  correspond  very  closely  to  the  build  of 
boats  in  use  among  the  Vikings  many  centuries  later.  Only 
that  Tacitus  tells  us  one  fact,  which  distinguishes  in  a  marked 
degree  the  Scandinavian  ships  of  his  age  from  the  Viking  ships 
— namely,  that  they  had  no  sails.  Of  the  Viking  ships  we  will 
speak  again  at  the  proper  place. 

That  the  Baltic  countries  were  once  rich  in  arms  we  might 
judge  from  the  remains  of  the  Bronze  Age  in  these  countries. 
For  in  no  other  part  of  Europe  do  we  find  such  beautiful 
bronze  weapons  as  in  Denmark  and  South  Sweden — unless  it 
be  in  those  prehistoric  cities  and  treasure-houses  of  the  Greek 
race,  which  recent  excavations  have  brought  to  light — the  ex- 
cavations at  Ilium,  I  mean,  or  Tiryns.2 

In  these  two   particulars,  therefore,  Tacitus's  almost  solitary 

time  of  their  incorporation  or  semi-incorporation  into  the  Frankish  kingdom 
at  the  end  of  the  fifth  century,  and  of  the  labours  among  them  of  Boniface, 
at  the  beginning  of  the  eighth  century. 

1  Montelius,  Civilization  of  Sweden  (Wood),  pp.  73-5. 

2  The  likeness  between  the  Scandinavian  bronzes  and  these  pre-Hellenic 
ones  has  been  noticed.  It  is  difficult  to  say  what  conclusions,  if  any,  are 
to  be  drawn  from  this  fact,  cf.  Aarbog  for  Nordisk  OZdkyndighed,  1882,  p. 
279  sqq.  (S.  Miiller). 


26  HEATHENDOM. 

item  of  information  about  the  Scandinavian  lands  seems  con- 
firmed. The  third  statement,  that  they  were  rich  in  men,  is  the 
hardest  to  give  credence  to.  Yet  one  fact,  at  any  rate,  may  be 
alleged  in  support  of  it :  among  those  powerful  German  nation- 
alities which  became  the  overthrowers  of  the  Roman  Empire, 
the  greater  number  kept  the  tradition  of  a  migration  by  their 
forefathers  from  the  Scandinavian  peninsula  to  the  mainland  of 
Europe.  The  Goths  had  this  belief.  We  know  how  they  and 
the  Gepidse  were  supposed  to  have  come  over  in  three  keels 
(Ostrogoths,  Visigoths,  and  Gepidae),  to  the  mouth  of  the 
Vistula — those  three  keels  which  unfortunately  figure  in  many 
a  Teutonic  migration  myth,  our  own  among  the  number.  The 
Lombards,  too,  believed  that  they  had  come  from  Scandinavia.1 
Jordanes  had  the  same  belief  as  Tacitus  about  the  prolificness 
of  the  Scandinavian  land.  He  calls  it  (the  '  island '  of  Scanzia) 
'  the  workshop  of  races,'  ojjicina  gentium  sive  vagina  nationum. 
All  this  points  to  a  common  belief  in  the  teeming  soil  of  Scan- 
dinavia, which  Tacitus  only  retails. 

That  the  belief  was  founded  on  fact  I  do  not  mean  to  main- 
tain.2 It  may  have  had  its  rise  in  mythology.  There  may 
have  been  some  peculiar  sacredness  attaching  to  the  Scandi- 
navian 'island,'  or  some  special  myth  connected  with  it,  which 
made  it  the  origin  of  the  first  human  pair,  in  the  same  sense 
that  that  sacred  grove  of  the  Semnones  was  the  birthplace  of 
Wuotan.  Old  Teutonic  belief  related  how  three  of  the  great 
gods,  walking  through  the  world,  had  found  two  trees  or  two 


1  These  names  do  not  nearly  exhaust  the  list  of  Teutonic  nationalities, 
whose  traditions  pointed  to  a  Scandinavian  origin.  Penka  {Hei'kutift 
der  Arier,  p.  142)  gives  an  exhaustive  list  of  them.  It  includes  the  names 
of  the  Goths,  Gepidse,  Heruli,  Lombards,  Angli  and  Saxones,  Franks, 
Burgundians,  Vandals,  &c.  Some  nations,  e.g.,  the  Cimbri  and  Teutones, 
can  only  be  traced  as  far  back  as  to  the  Cimbric  Chersonese.  The  Danes, 
on  their  side,  probably  migrated  to  Denmark  from  the  south  of  Sweden. 

a  See  below,  p.  30,  note  2. 


SCEAF.  27 

logs  of  wood,  ash  and  elm,  and  out  of  these  had  created  the 
first  human  pair.1  If  that  was  supposed  to  have  happened  in 
Scanzia,  this  myth  would  be  enough  to  make  Scanzia  the  officina 
gentium  of  later  tradition,  and  enough  to  hand  on  to  Tacitus  a 
history  of  the  number  of  nations  who  had  proceeded  thence. 
For  I  think  that  the  traditions  just  related  of  the  origins  of  the 
Goths  and  the  Lombards,  and  so  forth,  instead  of  precisely 
confirming  Tacitus'  statement,  only  account  for  it. 

At  the  head,  or  near  the  head,  of  many  Teutonic  genealogies 
we  find  the  name  of  a  mythic  being  called  Sceaf,2  Skef — which 
is  Sheaf.  And  the  fragments  of  myth  obtainable  about  Sceaf 
show  him  to  have  been  a  half-divine  being,  a  demi-god  or  lesser 
god,  to  whom  was  entrusted  a  mission  not  unlike  the  mission 
given  to  Triptolemus  by  Demeter,  the  duty  of  scattering  abroad 
among  mankind  the  seeds  of  a  higher  culture.  In  the  myth  of 
Sceaf  a  ship  takes  the  place  of  the  serpent-chariot  of  Triptolemus. 
At  the  dawn  of  the  world's  history  this  divine  child  was  wafted 
in  a  boat  to  the  coast  of  Scandinavia  or  Denmark.  He  was 
found  sleeping  with  his  head  upon  a  sheaf  (whence  his  name, 
say  the  myths,  speaking  obviously  in  a  late  Euhemeristic 
fashion),  and  the  boat,  too,  was  full  of  weapons  till  then  un- 
known to  mankind.  According  to  a  recent  writer  on  Teutonic 
mythology,  this  Sceaf  is  identical  with  a  certain  Norse  god, 
Heimdal,  who  was  himself  one  of  the  creators  of  the  human 
race. 3  This  last  identification  is  of  secondary  importance  here. 
Sceaf  lived  to  be  a  very  old  man,  and  reigned  peaceably  in  the 
land  of  his  adoption.     Under  him  mankind   entered  upon  a 

1    Voluspd,  17,  18  {Corp.  Poet.  Boreale). 

8  Sax.  Chr.  s.a.  855.  Three  MSS.  make  Sceaf  the  ancestor  of  the 
West  Saxon  kings.  MS.  A  has  Sceldwa  ( =  Danish,  Skyld).  Beowulf  makes 
the  miraculous  child,  Scyld,  son  of  Sceaf. 

3  Rydberg,  Tent.  Myth.  87-9,  90-3.  &c  I  have  not  space,  unfortu- 
nately, even  in  an  appendix,  to  follow  out  the  ramifications  of  the  Skef- 
Skyld  myths  and  genealogies. 


28  HE  A  THBNDOM. 

new  and  higher  life.  When  very  old  he  was  carried  down  and 
placed  once  more  in  the  boat  which  had  borne  him  to  those 
shores,  '  by  no  less  gifts  accompanied  than  when  a  child  he 
had  come  thither,'  men  knew  not  whence.  This  is  what  our 
poem  Beowulf  tells  us  of  his  end.1 

I  trust  I  shall  not  be  accused  of  extravagance  if  I  surmise 
in  this  history  of  Sceaf  some  reminiscence  of  a  culture  brought 
to  the  Baltic  from  Greece  or  from  Rome  in  prehistoric  ages. 
It  may  be  that  some  new  kind  of  corn  was  introduced  into 
the  north  then;  it  is  far  from  improbable  that  the  ships  which 
made  their  way  down  the  Vistula  to  the  Baltic  were  the  first 
ships — as  distinguished  from  rude  canoes — which  ever  plied  in 
that  sea.  And  the  unmistakable  resemblance  between  some 
of  the  prehistoric  bronze  weapons  of  Greece  and  the  Bronze 
Age  weapons  of  Scandinavia  might  suggest  that  these  weapons 
were  those  on  which  the  Sheaf  was  sleeping  when  he  came  to 
the  far  north.2 

Or,  to  put  the  matter  more  plainly,  suppose  Greek  wanderers 
to  have  come  northward  to  see  what  they  could  pick  up  in  the 
way  of  trade.  Suppose  them  to  have  brought  with  them  a 
sheaf  or  sheaves  of  corn  never  seen  in  those  parts  before,  and 
alon<*  with  them  weapons  of  new  kinds ;  how  easily  might  this 
history  turn  into  the  legend  of  the  mysterious  being  Sceaf 
carried  in  a  boat,  sleeping  upon  his  arms. 

I  do  not  mean  that  the  Triptolemus  myth  was  necessarily 
carried  north.  In  fact,  I  scarcely  think  that  that  could  have 
been  the  case.  For  how  would  the  dragon-drawn  chariot  have 
been  converted  into  a  ship  ?  Yet  even  this  is  possible  ;  it  is 
just  possible  that  the  Dragon-ship  had  its  origin  in  the  ship  of 
Sceaf.  The  boats  of  the  hallristningar  are  shaped  like  the 
Viking   ships.     They  have   the   same  long  curved  stems  and 

1  I.e.,  of  Scyld's  end.     See  previous  note. 

2  See,  however,  above  p.  25,  note  2. 


SCEAF.  29 

stern-posts  which  seemed  to  invite  the  boat  builders  of  the 
Viking  days  to  carve  them  into  the  likeness  ot  a  dragon  or 
worm.x 

This,  I  know,  is  mere  speculation.  What  remains  is  this 
myth  of  Sceaf — the  boat-borne,  the  father  of  men  (Heimdal?), 
or  at  the  least  the  father  of  a  new  civilization.  His  myth,  his 
worship,  if  he  ever  were  actually  a  god,  cannot  be  unconnected 
with  the  worship  of  the  Demeter  of  the  North,  the  Earth 
Mother  who  was  brought  from  some  island  of  the  Baltic  to  be 
borne  around  among  her  worshippers  in  Germany.  And  there 
is,  I  think,  enough  in  this  myth — taken  in  connection  with 
Tacitus's  account  of  Nerthus — to  explain  the  belief  current 
among  so  many  of  the  great  Teutonic  nations  that  they  had 
sprung  from  Scandinavia.2 

This  belief,  whatever  its  origin,  gives,  it  will  be  acknowledged 
a  special  interest  to  the  Scandinavian  countries,  even  from  the 
days  when  we  first  catch  sight  of  them.  Long  before  their 
inhabitants  actually  come  into  the  field  as  the  last  champions 
of  heathendom,  they  stand  at  the  background  of  the  nearer 
Teutons  ;  a  dark  and  mysterious  background,  giving,  if  I  may 
say  so,  a  sort  of  religious  sanction  to  their  existence.  The 
Teutons  did  not  really  all  spring  from  Scandinavia.  But  they 
thought  they  had  done  so ;  they  thought  they  had  come  from 

1  The  word  Draki  (Dragon)  our  drake  in  'fire-drake'  was  especially  used 
in  the  north  in  connection  with  ships  (see  Vigfusson's  Diet.  s.v.  Draki). 
It  is  extremely  antique  in  spite  of  its  undoubted  foreign  origin  from  draco 
or  Spdyjvv. 

The  hallristningar  ships  are,  moreover,  even  more  like  Greek  or  Roman 
galleys  than  the  later  ships  of  which  remains  are  found  in  Scandinavia. 
They  are,  many  of  them,  for  instance,  furnished  with  rams. 

2  I  will  remark  further  that  there  appears,  generally,  to  have  been 
something  sacred  about  an  island  in  the  eyes  of  the  Scandinavians  :  that 
peace-steads  were  frequently  made  on  islands ;  that  the  sacred  character  of 
the  island  was  the  origin  of  the  holm-gang,  and  of  the  exceptionally 
numerous  treasures  found  upon  some  of  the  Scandinavian  islands,  e.g.,  on 
Bornholm,  Oland,  and  Gottland. 


3o  HE  A  THENDOM. 

the  borders  of  that  sluggish  sea  which  girdled  and  enclosed  the 
whole  earth.  In  some  way  that  we  cannot  quite  understand 
this  belief  was  founded  upon  their  religious  creed. 

Once  more,  considering  the  matter  in  another  light,  we  may 
divide  the  German  races  into  four  divisions.  We  begin  with 
those  people  of  the  south  and  the  people  west  of  the  Rhine 
who  were  absorbed  into  the  Roman  Empire,  or  came  into 
peaceable  contact  with  it  and  accepted  much  of  its  civilization. 
We  come  next  to  the  people  east  of  the  Rhine,  the  nations  of 
the  Taunus,  of  the  Teutoberger  Wald  and  the  Harz,  who 
resisted  the  advance  of  the  Roman  arms  and  robbed  Rome  of 
her  conquests.1  Then  we  come  to  the  people  of  the  vast 
sandy  plains  south  of  the  Baltic,  who,  next  after  the  Franks, 
were  foremost  in  the  great  era  of  invasion,  when  Germany  was 
aggressive  and  no  longer  on  the  defensive  merely.  Finally, 
we  reach  the  Scandinavian  lands  from  which  came  the  second 
great  army  of  conquest  by  heathendom  over  Christendom. 

All  four  sections  were  of  essentially  the  same  race;  indeed 
that  division  of  speech  out  of  which  the  present  various 
branches  of  the  Teutonic  family  are  formed  (the  Lautverschie- 
bung  as  the  grammarians  call  it)  only  began  to  take  place 
about  the  Christian  era.  We  cannot  doubt  that  the  funda- 
mental creed  of  all  these  people  was  likewise  essentially  the 
same  for  all.  What  was  this  fundamental  creed  or,  at  any  rate, 
what  the  distinctive  features  of  it?  is  a  question  which  interests 
us  particularly.  For  the  battle  between  Heathendom  and 
Christendom  was  waged  in  all  wrays  and  with  all  manner  of 
weapons,  material  and  spiritual.2 

1  These  would  be  chiefly  the  ancestors,  at  any  rate  the  forerunners,  of  the 
Thuringians,  the  Franks,  and  the  Hessians  (Chatti).  The  last  were  included 
in  the  Frankish  nationality. 

2  In  regard  to  the  supposed  Scandinavian  origin  of  the  Teutonic  nations, 
to  which  reference  has  been  made  above,  we  ought  not  to  leave  out  of 
account  the  new  theory  of  Aryan  origins  which  has  been  developed  with 


SCANDINAVIAN  ORIGINS.  31 

much  learning  and  ingenuity  by  Dr.  Poesche,  and  by  Dr.  K.  Penka  in  his 
two  books,  Origines  Ariacce,  and  Die  herkunft  der  Arier  (1886).  (Though 
one  title  reads  like  a  translation  of  the  other,  they  are  two  separate  works.) 
According  to  this  theory,  not  the  German  races  alone,  but  the  whole  Aryan 
stock  has  had  its  origin  on  the  Scandinavian  peninsula.  It  is  impossible 
here  to  discuss  that  theory  at  length,  or  even  to  explain  its  provisions.  It 
is  not  quite  correct  to  say  that  Dr.  Penka  supposes  the  whole  Aryan  stock 
to  have  migrated  from  the  extreme  north.  The  Indo-European  race  itself, 
he  supposes  to  be  a  mixed  one,  half  Scandinavian  and  dolichocephalous, 
half  Turanian  and  brachycephalous,  whose  amalgamation  dates  from  very 
remote  prehistoric  times  ;  but  he  suggests  that  the  language  of  the  Aryans 
originally  belonged  to  the  dolichocephalous  fair  race  of  the  Scandinavian 
peninsula.  The  race  is  supposed  to  have  come  into  existence  under  sub- 
glacial  conditions,  to  which  its  fair  type  is  due,  and  at  the  termination  of 
the  glacial  era  to  have  migrated  northward,  in  order  to  keep  to  a  climate 
more  congenial  to  its  physique.  In  Scandinavia  alone,  it  is  said,  have  we, 
in  the  kitchen-middens,  human  remains  which  bridge  over  the  gap  between 
the  palaeolithic  and  neolithic  eras.  The  theory  is  ingenious  ;  1  do  not 
profess  to  be  able  to  gauge  its  probability.  But  there  are  very  obvious 
difficulties  in  the  way  of  its  acceptance  ;  and  among  those  who  are  not 
specialists  or  who  do  not  (as  Mr.  Freeman  has  happily  said)  think  it  is  the 
height  of  learning  to  accept  the  last  new  German  book,  it  will  probably 
wait  some  time  for  acceptance. 

It  is  scarcely,  I  presume,  necessary  to  point  out  to  the  reader  that  this 
theory  has,  no  more  than  any  of  the  observations  made  on  p.  21,  above, 
concerning  the  essential  unity  of  the  nationalities  of  the  Baltic  shores  and 
of  the  northern  plains  of  Germany,  nothing  to  do  with  the  theories  put 
forward  in  Mr.  Du  Chaillu's  recent  work,  and  implied  in  the  title:  The 
Viking  Age ;  the  Early  History,  Manners,  and  Customs  of  the  Ancestors 
of  the  English-speaking  Nations. 


CHAPTER  II. 
THE  CREED  OF  HEA  THEN  GERMANY. 

I. 

Christianity  passed  through  three  stages  on  her  road  to  the 
conquest  of  Europe.  From  being  an  offshoot  of  Judaism,  she 
became  the  religion  of  the  '  Gentiles,'  that  is  to  say,  of  the 
peoples  formed  mainly  by  Grseco-Roman  culture :  then  she 
extended  her  empire  over  the  heathens.  The  second  stage 
alone  of  these  three  is  clearly  illuminated  for  us.  Of  the 
Christian  community — Christian  Church  if  you  like  to  call  it 
so — while  it  was  still  Judaic  under  the  presidency  of  Peter  and 
James,  of  its  quarrels  with  Pauline  Christianity,  we  get  a  hint 
only,  no  clear  idea.  But  of  the  acts  of  Paul  and  his  writings, 
of  the  acts  and  writings  of  the  succeeding  '  fathers,',  all  drawn 
from  the  Graeco-Roman  world,  we  have  abundant  remains.  On 
entering  the  third  stage  darkness  again  falls  round  us.  We 
have  in  reality  but  a  very  slight  and  fragmentary  history  of 
the  contests  between  Christianity  and  heathenism,  of  the 
failures  and  successes  of  the  forgotten  army  of  missionaries 
who  went  out  to  convert  the  Teutonic  races.  And  we  are 
without  that  which  alone  could  give  full  meaning  to  such 
accounts  as  we  possess,  a  picture  of  the  creed  on  which 
Christianity  made  war. 


STRA  Y  GLIMPSES  OF  ANCIENT  BELIEFS.       33 

Were  it  only  possible  to  recover  in  their  entirety  the  beliefs  of 
our  heathen  forefathers  !  But  this  is  for  ever  impossible.  We 
must  content  ourselves  with  stray  glimpses  of  it ;  some  (very 
slight  ones)  in  the  pages  of  classical  writers  ;  some  others 
recovered  from  the  recorded  creed  of  one  branch  of  the 
Teutonic  nation  in  a  later  age.  This  creed,  though  it  is  so  much 
later  in  date,  must  preserve  some  elements  of  great  antiquity. 
In  addition  we  know,  and  it  is  a  great  thing  to  know,  the 
character  of  the  land  in  which  the  ancient  Germans  lived  ;  and 
we  know  something  of  the  life  they  lived  there  in  ancient 
days,  before  the  spirit  of  movement  had  begun  to  breathe 
through  all  the  German  races,  and  to  inaugurate  that  epoch  of 
Wandering  which  preluded  the  fall  of  Rome. 

At  the  present  day  if  we  wish  to  find  a  country,  a  dis- 
trict, wrapped  round  in  a  garment  of  myth  ;  if  we  wish  to 
see  landscapes,  churches,  old  manor-houses,  an  ancient  tree,  a 
solitary  mere,  touched  and  gilded  by  that  Aberglaube  which  is, 
as  Goethe  says,  the  poetry  of  life,  we  shall  not  turn  to  the  busy 
changing  inhabitants  of  the  neighbouring  town,  who  have  heard 
and  forgotten  a  hundred  tales  of  wonder;  but  to  the  people 
of  the  nearest  villages,  who  have  lived  in  them  from  father  to 
son,  who  have  treasured  up  with  much  slower  apprehension, 
but  far  more  faithful  memories,  the  mythology  of  the  place, 
until  it  has  grown  into  their  lives  and  formed — 

eine  Kette 
Der  tiefsten  Wirkung. 

For  a  like  reason  it  cannot  have  been  in  the  power  either 
of  the  Germans  of  the  early  Wanderings,  or  of  those  northern 
pirates,  part  of  whose  history  is  our  special  concern  here,  to 
have  invented  the  essential  beliefs  of  Teutonism.  They  were, 
in  truth,  things   incapable   of   invention   by  any  one,  as   we 

4 


34  CREED  OF  HEATHEN  GERMANY, 

understand  that  word ;  but  beliefs  which  grew  up  by  a  natural 
process  out  of  the  ancestral  life  of  the  Teutons  and  all  its 
surroundings. 

However  much  the  stand-point  of  those  who  looked  from 
outside  into  the  heathen  lands  may  have  differed  from  the 
stand-point  of  the  inhabitants,  the  character  of  the  countries 
themselves  remained  the  same  for  both.  It  was  accident  and 
the  popular  superstition  of  the  Gauls  which  converted  Cale- 
donia into  a  land  of  ghosts.  But  for  all  that  Caledonia  was 
then  what  it  still  is,  stern  and  wild,  girt  by  the  melancholy 
ocean,  and  for  all  that  men  could  know  in  those  days,  at  the 
outer  extremity  of  the  whole  world.  So  with  Germany 
— or  the  Germanies,  including  the  Scandinavian  lands — 
Tacitus's  description,  '  dank  and  gloomy,'  applied  to  them  all. 
His  picture  of  the  Germans  dwelling  apart  'by  stream,  or  grove, 
or  plot  of  open  ground,'  might  serve  best  for  the  Germans  near 
the  Rhine  or  in  the  broken  country  eastward  as  far  as  the 
Thuringian  forest  and  the  Harz.  But  the  vast  unfruitful 
plains  of  North  Germany  compelled  men  to  live  apart  for  the 
sake  of  sustenance.  There  was  less  of  choice  here,  but  more 
of  necessity. 

All  these  lands  must  have  been  densely  wooded.  The  entire 
country  known  to  the  Romans  certainly  was  so.  In  the  centre 
and  south  lay  the  boundless  Hercynian  forest,  which  stretched 
beyond  the  regions  where  even  stray  merchants  and  travellers 
had  penetrated.  It  threw  out  a  wing  northward  to  include 
the  Teutoberger  forest,  Varus's  fatal  wood,  the  Thuringian 
forest,  and  the  Cheruscan  Harz  {Mons  Melibcecus),  a  wing  south- 
west to  take  in  the  present  Black  Forest,  the  Silva  Marciana 
of  Roman  days.  Without  doubt  the  plains  immediately  to 
the  south  of  the  Baltic  were  not  less  thickly  overshadowed 
by  primeval  woods.  The  Cimbric  Chersonese  was  densely 
covered.     Centuries  later  the  coasts  alone  of  the  Scandinavian 


PHYSICAL  FEATURES.  35 

countries  were  inhabited  or  tilled.  Munch  x  draws  a  fine  pic- 
ture of  the  Scandinavian  peninsula  in  prehistoric  days,  sub- 
merged under  its  thick  black  forests  as  under  some  huge 
black  sea,  out  of  which  the  bare  hill-tops  rose  like  islands,  and 
on  these  hill-tops  the  nomadic  Finns,  or  Lapps,  the  only 
inhabitants  of  the  interior  in  those  times,  pastured,  as  the  Lapps 
of  the  north  do  to-day,  their  cattle  and  reindeer.  Such  is  his 
picture,  needing  modification,  perhaps,  in  the  last  touch,2  but 
none  in  its  essential  features.  The  early  Norse  sagas  tell  us 
of  this  or  that  hero  who  penetrated  into  the  peninsula  and 
created  for  himself,  as  it  were,  a  new  country,  a  new  world,  by 
felling  a  clearing  in  the  primeval  forest.  Such  an  one  was 
Anleifr  Tretelgja,  Olaf  Tree-feller,  who  is  spoken  of  in  the 
y?iglinga.^  He  is  half  mythical;  but  he  or  his  antitype 
must  have  lived  ages  after  Tacitus  wrote  what  he  wrote  of  the 
forests  of  Germany. 

We  know,  too,  something  of  the  way  of  life  among  these 
ancient  Germans.  They  lived  apart;  but  yet  their  scattered 
houses  formed  a  group  which  we  in  these  days  should  call  a 
village.  Yet  we  must  not  picture  to  ourselves  the  English  village, 
with  its  two  rows  of  houses  close  side  by  side  and  '  dressed,' 
like  two  ranks  of  soldiers  facing  inwards,  on  the  long  village 
street.  Even  to-day  in  Germany  you  may  find  an  arrangement 
far  more  primitive  than  this — houses  scattered  in  so  far  that 
they  face  all  ways,  and  the  high-road  loses  itself  among  the 
multiplicity  of  paths  between  them.*     In  Sweden  and  Norway, 

1  Det  Norske  Folks  Historie,  beginning. 

2  It  seems  pretty  certain  that  the  Finns  and  Lapps  have  not  reached 
Scandinavia  by  migrating  northwards  as  was  once  supposed,  but  from  the 
north.  That  they  ever  reached  further  than  half  way  down  the  Scandinavian 
peninsula  is  not  proved. 

3  Ynglinga  Saga  46  (Heimskr.).  The  Danes  in  England,  we  know, 
earned  the  name  of  '  tree-fellers.' 

4  Villages  of  this  description  are  specially  characteristic  of  the  Rhine 
country.     See  R,  Ilennmg,  Das  Deutsche  Hates,  p.  22. 


36  CREED  OF  HEATHEN  GERMANY. 

wherever  there  is  room  enough,  we  see  something  resembling 
much  more  the  primitive  village  of  the  Teutons,  houses  dotted 
about  far  apart  over  a  considerable  plain.  To-day  this  area  is 
generally  a  clearing.  But  forest  villages  are  still  to  be  found. 
In  these  one  house  can  often  see  none  of  its  neighbours  ;  each 
one  has  its  own  small  patch  of  cultivated  ground. 

Among  the  various  households  of  the  village  the  land  was 
distributed  in  such  a  manner  that  we  may  divide  its  portions 
into  three — the  allotment,  the  farm,  and  the  common.  Some 
people  will  have  it  that  the  principles  of  land  tenure  too 
resolved  themselves  into  three  —  private,  communal,  and 
common  :  meaning  by  communal  land  that  held  by  the  com- 
munity as  a  whole,  and  not  in  private  ownership,  and  redis- 
tributed each  year,  or  at  stated  times,  by  authority  of  the  village 
council — council  of  eldermen,  aldermen,  or  whatever  it  might 
be  called.  This  theory  of  the  farm  land  held  as  communal 
land  is  at  the  least  doubtful.1  But  what  is  not  doubtful  is  that 
beside  the  private  allotment  belonging  to  each  house  or  house- 
hold, beside  the  portion  of  farm -land  which  was  held  by  each 
household  but  not  held  under  quite  so  '  good  '  a  title,  there  was 
the  large  district  of  common,  or  rough  pasture,  as  it  was  some- 
times called,  in  which  no  individual  rights  existed.  In  countries 
where  the  squirrel  could  travel  for  leagues  without  touching  the 
ground,  the  common  of  the  village  must  have  been  merely  that 
portion  of  the  forest  over  which  the  community  claimed  as  a 
body  settlers'  rights.  The  nearer  portions  of  the  forest  were  no 
doubt  used  by  the  villagers  for  feeding  their  cattle  and  swine. 

But  there  was  beyond  them  a  more  desolate  tract  which  served 
to  separate  the  village  from  its  neighhours.2  And  when  a  number 

1  I  have  not  attempted  to  enter  the  thorny  path  of  controversy  on  the 
subject  of  the  so-called  'Village  Community.'  I  have  merely  followed 
Waitz.      Verfassungsgesch.  i.  93  sqq. 

2  This  came  to  be  the  true  '  forest '  of  feudal  times. 


THE  VILLAGE  AND  THE  GAU.  37 

of  villages  were  inhabited  by  members  of  the  same  tribe,  a 
whole  group  of  them,  forming  what  the  Latin  writers  called  a 
pagus,  and  the  Germans  themselves  called  a  Gau,  was  divided 
from  the  neighbouring  Gau  by  a  still  wider  and  more  impene- 
trable belt  of  forest.  For  the  Gau  was  the  tribe,  the  embryo  state ; 
and  Caesar  tells  us  that  it  was  a  point  of  honour  with  each 
German  state  to  have  as  wide  a  tract  of  uncultivated  land  as 
possible  between  itself  and  its  next  neighbours.1 

This  surrounding  belt  of  wood,  this  gloomy  and  waste 
region,  in  the  near  part  of  which  the  ancient  German  villagers 
tethered  their  cattle  or  herded  their  pigs,  and  in  the  farther 
recesses  hunted  wild  game,  had  a  special  name  in  the  social 
economy  of  the  Teutons.  It  was  called  the  Mark.  As  each 
village  had  its  own  mark,  so  had,  in  a  wider  sense,  each  country 
or  nation.  When  the  tiny  embryos  of  commonwealths,  the  Gaus 
expanded  into  states,  the  marks,  too,  grew  in  importance,  and 
became  great  territorial  divisions,  till  out  of  them  new  countries 
were  in  their  turn  made  ;  such  was  our  Mercia  (Myrcna) ;  such 
the  marches  between  England  and  Wales;  Denmaik,  the  Danes' 
mark  (the  south  of  Jutland  originally) ;  La  Marque,  which 
afterwards  separated  that  country  from  Germany  and  the  Low 
Countries ;  the  Wendish  Mark  or  Mark  of  Brandenburg,  which 
divided  Germany  from  the  Slavonic  lands.  The  guardians  of 
the  mark  were  turned  into  marquises,  marchios,  markgrafs.  At 
the  beginning  these  guardians  were  only  the  chief  warriors  of 
the  tribe;  they  had  often  (we  may  believe)  their  home  in  the 
waste,  and  stood  there  as  watchmen  between  the  village  and  the 
rest  of  the  world,  so  that  none  might  come  to  the  village  if 
they  came  to  do  it  harm.  These  were  par  excellence  the  warriors 
of  the  tribe,  and  in  some  degree  they  constituted  a  class  apart. 

But  let  us  remember  that  the  word  Mark,  which  we  think  of 

*  B.  G.  iv.  3. 


38  CREED  OF  HEATHEN  GERMANY. 

as  the  boundary  between  two  possibly  hostile  states,  has  ety- 
mologically,  and  therefore  had  originally,  no  other  meaning 
than  forest* 

We  can  best  understand  the  incidents  of  warfare  waged  by 
more  civilized  peoples  against  the  Germans  of  Germany,  the 
incidents  of  the  campaigns  of  Drusus  and  Tiberius,  of  Marcus 
Aurelius,  of  Gratian  or  Julian,  or,  again,  of  Charlemagne's 
campaigns  against  the  Saxons,  if  we  remember  that  there 
must  have  been  a  distinction  between  the  ordinary  villagers,  the 
more  peaceful  folk  who  cultivated  the  clearings  near  at  hand, 
and  the  men  of  the  mark,  the  warriors  who  dwelt  in  the  sur- 
rounding forest,  who  when  they  were  not  engaged  in  war  were 
probably  hunters  merely.  There  would  be  a  certain  lurking 
suspicion  or  latent  antagonism  between  the  village  householder 
and  the  mark  warrior,  analogous  to  the  antagonism  which  existed 
between  the  Franklin  and  the  Thane  at  a  later  day.  No 
doubt  from  the  markmen  came  the  band  of  Gesellen — Comites 
the  Latin  writers  call  them — who  attached  themselves  to  the 
person  of  the  king  or  general,  and  shared  his  fortunes.  If  the 
leader  should  desire  to  reward  these  followers  of  his  by  any 
grant  of  land  (though  such  reward  was  exceptional 2),  that  gift 
must  have  come  from  the  surrounding  forest ;  it  could  not  be 
carved  out  of  the  village  community  itself.  3  Thus  might  arise 
a  certain  aloofness  from  civil  village  life  on  the  part  of  the 
Gesellen,  the  prototypes  of  the  Thanes.  They  were,  it  may  be, 
to  a  great  extent  unmarried  men  ;  they  had  given  few  pledges 
to  fortune;   they  had  not  (generally)  acres  to  be  trampled 

1  So  Grimm,  Deutsche  Mythol.  4th  ed.,p.  56.  Fick  is  not  so  clear, 
Verg.  Wbch.  ii.  434.  The  use  of  the  word  mark  to  signify  a  village 
community  has  no  authority  in  its  favour. 

2  The  Comites,  we  know,  ate  at  their  leader's  table,  and  for  pay  they  got 
arms  or  ornaments — personalty — things  for  personal  wear  or  use. 

3  On  the  king's  rights  in  this  uncultivated  territory,  and  afterwards  in 
the  mark  of  any  new  territory  see  Waitz,  Verfassungsg.  iv.  116. 


THE  MARK.  39 

upon,  fruit-trees  to  be  cut  down,  graneries  to  be  burned.  The 
villagers  might,  if  they  chose,  give  in  to  the  conqueror.  But 
the  prince  and  his  comrades  had  escaped,  had  hidden  them- 
selves in  deep  woods  and  morasses,  and  would  return  and 
ravage  the  enemies'  country  again  next  year.  This  is  the 
history  of  most  of  the  operations  against  the  Germans,  notably 
of  those  of  Charles  the  Great  against  the  Saxons  and  against 
Widukind. 

The  mark  or  forest  which  formed  a  sort  of  neutral  territory 
between  two  villages  or  two  Gaue  would  serve  as  the  meeting- 
point  between  them  ;  for  the  same  reason  that  during  the 
Middle  Ages  meetings  of  rival  powers  were  constantly  held 
upon  an  island  or  on  a  boat  in  the  middle  of  a  stream,  as 
in  the  case  of  the  island  at  Runnymead  for  one  example,  or, 
for  another,  that  earliest  of  treaties  made  between  Romans 
and  Teutons,  the  treaty  signed  by  Athanaric  the  Visigoth 
and  the  Emperor  Valens,  where  the  contracting  parties  met 
in  a  boat  upon  the  Danube ; x  or  again  on  the  same  principle 
whereby  a  duel  between  Norsemen  always  took  place  upon  an 
island,  a  fact  which  earned  for  the  duel  the  name  of  holmgang. 
What  an  island  was  in  the  midst  of  a  boundary  river,  such 
would  an  open  glade  be  in  the  midst  of  the  boundary  mark. 
At  the  meetings  which  took  place  therein  no  doubt  the 
sanctions  of  religion  were  called  into  request,  and  the  glade 
in  the  forest,  or  the  grove  close  beside  it,  a  place  not  often 
visited,  came  to  be  a  sacred  place. 

II. 

The  Germans  are  described  as  building  no  fanes,  making  no 
images  for  worship,  but  in  their  forest  recesses  calling  upon 
the  Unseen  Presence  {secretum   Mud),  which  they  honoured 

1  Ammian.  Marc,  xxvii.  5,  9. 


40  CREED  OF  HEATHEN  GERMANY. 

by  the  name  of  various  gods  (or  by  various  names).1  The 
word  for  grove  is  in  many  Teutonic  languages  a  convertible 
word  with  te?nple : 2  this  fact  proves,  better  than  a  thousand 
examples,  how  entirely  the  religion  of  the  Germans  was  bound 
up  with  their  forest  life.  Grimm  says  :  c  Individual  gods  may 
have  had  their  dwellings  on  mountain-tops  or  in  rocky  caverns, 
but  the  universal  worship  of  the  people  found  its  home  in  the 
grove.' 

From  a  writer  of  the  eleventh  century  we  have  a  precious 
fragment  of  ancient  belief — the  description  of  a  sacred  grove 
in  Sweden  while  Sweden  was  still  heathen.  This  grove  was  at 
the  most  sacred  spot  in  all  the  Scandinavian  peninsula,  Upsala, 
which  has  inherited  (one  might  say)  its  bishopric  and  univer- 
sity of  to-day  from  the  sacred  grove  of  heathendom.  *  Every 
ninth  year,'  says  our  authority  (Adam  of  Bremen),  '  a  festival 
is  celebrated  at  this  place  by  all  the  provinces  of  Sweden  ;  and 
from  taking  some  part  in  it  none  is  exempt.  King  and  people 
alike  must  send  gifts ;  and  even  those  who  have  embraced 
Christianity  are  not  allowed  to  buy  themselves  free  from 
attendance.  The  manner  of  the  sacrifice  is  this  :  nine  of 
each  kind  of  living  tiling  is  offered,  and  by  their  blood  the 
gods  are  wont  to  be  appeased.  The  bodies  are  hung  in  the 
grove  which  surrounds  the  temple.'  So  that  the  Swedes  did 
build  temples  at  this  date.  But  our  author  tells  us  further : 
'  The  grove  itself  is  thought  so  sacred  that  single  trees  in  it 
are  accounted  a  kind  of  gods,  to  the  extent  of  receiving 
sacrifices  of  victims.  There  hang  the  bodies  of  dogs  and 
men  alike  to  the  number,  as  some  Christians  have  assured 
me,  of  seventy-two  3  together.'  * 


'  Germania,  c.  9. 

3  Grimm,  Deutsche  Mythol.,  4th  ed.,  p.  54 ;  Nachtrag,  p.  32. 
*  I.e.,  nine  times  eight. 

4  M.  Adami  Descript.  insular,  aquil.  27  (Pertz,  vii.  380). 


SACRED  TREES,  41 

The  last  item  in  this  picture  seems  to  glance  back  to  a  very 
primitive  worship,  not  so  much  a  cultus  of  the  secret  presence  in 
the  grove,  rather  to  a  mere  fetich-worship  of  individual  trees  ; 
and  no  doubt  this  element  did  mingle  with  a  higher  and  more 
imaginative  faith. 

Further  relics  of  this  primitive  fetich-worship,  so  to  call  it, 
are  to  be  found  in  the  records,  which  are  numerous  enough, 
of  sacred  trees,  sacred  oaks  especially,  among  the  heathen 
Teutons,  as  among  the  Cells.  The  few  details  which  have 
come  down  to  us  of  Christian  missionary  labours  among  the 
heathen  Germans  speak  often  of  the  felling  by  the  Christians 
of  these  trees ;  sometimes  a  church  was  erected  upon  their 
site.  The  most  typical  of  these  instances,  the  felling  of  the 
so-called  Jupiter's  Oak  (Thor's  Oak)  at  Gaesmera  (Geismar  in 
Hesse),  we  shall  speak  of  again  in  the  next  chapter. 

There  were  in  addition  the  sacred  trees — for  they  must  have 
been  sacred — under  which  the  German  people  met  to  hold 
council.  Each  village  had  once  its  own  sacred  tree,  the 
prototype  of  the  May-pole — in  some  degree  the  prototype 
too  of  our  Christmas-trees.  May-poles  are  practically  ex- 
tinct with  us ;  nowhere,  I  believe,  are  they  fixtures  now  as 
was  *  the  May-pole  in  the  Strand '  a  century  ago.  But  in 
very  many  villages  in  Germany  they  are  fixtures;  nay,  in 
many  cases  they  are  growing  trees,  tall  pines  which  have 
been  stripped  of  all  their  lower  branches.  The  sacred  village 
tree  would  be  the  place  of  assemblage  of  the  village  council. 
I  imagine  it  standing  a  little  way  apart  from  any  of  the  houses ; 
for  it  had  another  duty  to  perform.  It  was  the  tree  of 
judgment.  Victims,  including  human  ones,  as  we  have  seen, 
would   be   required   for   offerings    to    the   tree-fetich. x      For 

1  c Stato  tempore  in  silvam  .  .  .  coetmt,  ccesoque  publice  homine  .  .  .' 
(Tacitus,  I.e.  39).  These  remarks  assume  the  existence  of  a  village  council. 
There  is  for  times  near  to  the  historical  no  trace  of  village  councils  exercising 


42  CREED  OF  HEATHEN  GERMANY. 

the  human  victims  captives  of  war  would  serve  in  an  age 
which  had  grown  too  merciful  for  the  sacrifice  of  its  own 
tribesmen ;  or,  failing  prisoners  of  war,  there  would  be 
criminals ;  those,  for  example,  who  had  been  traitors  to 
their  own  tribe  or  had  deserted  to  the  enemy— proditores 
et  transfoigce  x — those  who  had  made  themselves  outlaws,  and 
so  no  longer  members  of  the  community,  would  be  the  natural 
and  appropriate  victims.  And  they  are  they  to  whom  the 
Teutons  decreed  the  punishment  of  hanging. 

Varg-tre  (Wolf-tree) — that  is  to  say,  outlaws-tree — is  one  of 
the  most  usual  names  for  gallows  in  the  Old  Norse  poetry. 
Now,  let  us  remember  what  Tacitus  tells  us,  namely,  that  to 
the  chief  god  of  the  Germans,  to  Wodin  alone,  were  human 
sacrifices  offered,2  and  we  see  that  the  gallows-tree,  which 
was  likewise  the  sacred  tree  of  the  village,  must  have  been 
dedicated  specially  to  Wodin  (Wuotan).  To  the  lower  minds, 
then,  and  in  earlier  days,  the  sacred  tree  was  the  village  fetich ; 
but  to  the  higher  minds  or  at  a  later  time  it  was  merely  Wodin's 
tree,  the  symbol  of  the  unseen  supreme  god. 

This  is,  I  imagine,  why  in  the  Eddie  mythology  the  gallows- 
tree  is  called  Ygg's-horse — Wodin's  horse  (Yggdrasil);  and  why 
this  same  Yggdrasil  is  the  sacred  tree  of  the  whole  world, 
which,  of  course,  means  no  more  than  that  a  picture  drawn 
from  the  single  village  or  tribe-stead  has  been  expanded  to 
serve  for  the  whole  world,  a  macrocosmos  created  out  of  a 
microcosmos.  I  dare  say  that  the  importance  of  this  world- 
tree  is  heightened   in   the   Eddas   through   the  influence  of 

the  judicial  functions  which  would  be  necessary  to  provide  victims  for  the 
fetich-tree  (Waitz,  I.e.).  I  do  not  mean,  therefore,  that  at  any  time 
proximate  to  an  historical  era  such  sacrifice  of  human  victims  to  the  sacred 
tree  took  place  in  each  village.  But  it  began  in  single  villages,  only  later 
was  confined  to  groves  particularly  sacred.  Compare  Lat.  tribiis.  Germ. 
Dor/. 

x  Germania,  12.  3  Ibid.,  9. 


MEIDHR.  43 

Christianity  and  Christian  mythology,  whereby  the  cross  be- 
comes the  tree  of  life.  But  1  doubt  if  there  is  here  anything 
more  than  the  emphasizing  of  a  myth  already  ancient  and  in 
itself  perfectly  natural. 

If  a  sacred  tree  decayed  or  lost  its  branches,  it  need  not  lose 
its  holiness,  and  there  would  in  this  fashion  arise  a  number  of 
very  antique  tree-stumps  or  tree-trunks,  bare  of  leaves  and 
branches,  which  were  still  a  sort  of  fetich  to  the  people,  which 
were  primevally  old,  and  stood  in  the  midst  of  venerable 
groves.  They  would  become  mere  poles  or  columns,  like 
the  dead  May-poles  of  to-day.  Such  was,  I  have  little  doubt, 
the  Irminsul,  Ermine-Saule  (Pillar  of  the  Hermiones),  which 
Charlemagne  captured  and  cut  down.  There  is  a  word  used  in 
the  Eddas,  meiftr  ( Vinga-meitSi  a,  *  on  the  gallows  wood ' ), 
which  seems  especially  to  designate  this  wood  when  it  has 
become  dead.  But  from  the  passage  in  which  this  word 
occurs  we  gather  that  the  dead  wood  retained  a  peculiar 
sanctity.1 

III. 
We  have  now,  I  think,  got  together  the  materials  to  form 
some  picture  of  the  familiar  life  of  the  ancient  German  in 
days  when  he  was  still  attached  to  his  ancestral  home,  before 
the  stir  and  excitement,  the  Sturm  und  Drang  of  the 
Wandering  Age  had  begun.  We  see  men  living  beneath  or 
hard  by  the  gloom  of  a  primeval  forest,  subject  to  those 
uncertain  visions  of  light  and  shade  which  belong  thereto, 
to  its  thousand  echoes — from  the  fall  of  rushing  waters,  the 
cries  of  animals,  the  crash  of  stems  or  branches  in  the  hollow 
distance,  the  sobbing  of  the  wind,  or  the  roar  of  the  storm 
coming  from  afar.  We  see  the  village  houses  standing  apart, 
gleaming  white  from  among  the  trees,2  and  still  farther  apart, 

1  See  below,  p.  52-  2  Being  frequently  of  white- washed  clay. 


44  CREED  OF  HEATHEN  GERMANY. 

and  deeper  in  the  forest,  the  houses  reserved  for  the  march- 
men,  the  guardians  of  the  waste.  We  see  the  elders  of  the 
village  withdrawing  on  one  side  to  sit  under  some  sacred  tree 
or  near  some  holy  grove.  Thither  each  member  ,of  the  com- 
munity brings  at  stated  times  his  offering — A  savage  place,  as 
holy  and  enchanted  as  could  make  it  long  ages  of  past  worship, 
and  dreadful  sacrifices  witnessed  from  then  to  now,  and 
preserved  in  memory  by  the  skeletons  of  the  victims  hanging 
in  the  grove,  whitening  its  darkness. 

When  Germanicus  made  his  attack  upon  the  Chatti  in  the 
Teutoberger  Wald,  and  by  a  victory  wiped  out  the  shame  of 
the  defeat  of  Varus,  he  found  the  skulls  of  the  Roman  victims 
fixed  to  the  trees,  and  the  Roman  eagles  which  Arminius  had 
suspended  in  the  groves  to  the  gods  of  his  fathers.1 

We  read  not  seldom  in  mediaeval  romance  of  some  cruel 
and  beautiful  maiden — a  Melusina  or  some  other — whose 
lovers  had  to  pay  with  their  lives  the  penalty  of  trying  to 
win  her.  Sometimes  the  court  round  her  castle  is  filled 
with  their  bleaching  bones.2  The  story  itself  is  as  old  as  the 
world  almost.  But  this  particular  form  of  it  reproduces  the 
picture  of  the  dreadful  grove  of  the  Teutons,  and  the  maiden 
of  the  myth  is  not  unconnected,  I  deem,  with  the  priestesses 
of  Wodin.     We  shall  see  so  much  hereafter. 

We  have  only  to  widen  the  picture  which  we  have  drawn  of 
the  ancient  Teuton  village,  leaving  out  some  lesser  details,  to 
get  a  notion  of  the  whole  state  and  its  creed,  its  '  cosmological 
conception/  as  it  is  called  in  philosophy,  and  its  conception 
of  the  supernatural  environment  of  life.     In  the  place  of  the 


1  Tacitus,  Ann.,  i.  59;  cf.  also  61.     In  ii.  12  a  grove  is  spoken  of  as 
dedicate  to  Thor  (Hercules). 

2  E.g.,  King  Rut  her. 


WODIN. 


45 


sacred  village  tree  we  should  get  one  which  was  honoured 
by  the  whole  community  as  was  the  Irminsul  among  the  Saxon 
Angrarii,  or  the  Geismar  oak  among  the  Hessians.  For  the 
sacred  grove  near  the  village  we  should  get  a  grove  held  sacred 
by  the  whole  country,  such  as  the  groves  in  which  stood  the 
trees  just  spoken  of,  or  the  grove  of  the  Semnones,  or  that  in 
which  Nerthus  dwelt,  or  the  grove  at  Upsala.  But  the  local 
fetich-worship  would  somewhat  fall  into  the  background  and 
the  more  spiritual  worship  of  the  people  as  a  whole  would 
emerge.  And  thus  all  the  great  gods  of  the  Teutonic  pantheon 
would  come  before  our  eyes. 

If  the  ancient  Germans  built  no  fanes,  the  grove  served  them 
as  a  temple ;  if  they  made  no  images  of  their  gods,  the  indi- 
vidual trees  often  served  them,  as  Adam  of  Bremen  witnesses,  for 
visible  and  tangible  gods.  Still,  there  was  a  more  imaginative 
side  to  their  creed.  There  was  a  Great  God  who  was  not  of 
the  fetich  kind.  He  was,  says  Tacitus,  a  '  sacred  presence ' 
only.  Was  he  ?  It  is  hard  to  believe  in  so  great  a  step  as 
from  the  worship  of  individual  trees  to  the  worship  of  a 
being  unseen,  unfelt,  wholly  apart  from  physical  phenomena. 
Some  of  the  Germans  may  have  been  capable  of  that,  but 
surely  not  all,  not  many.  The  Great  God  whom  we  know  as 
Wodin,  Odin,1  must  have  drawn  something  from  his  surround- 
ings. Why  was  his  presence  reserved  so  peculiarly  for  the 
grove?  Granting  he  was  unseen,  he  may  yet  have  been  felt. 
Without  doubt  his  presence  was  expressed  by  the  thousand 
mysterious  sounds  and  breaths  of  the  forest,  but  most  of  all 
by  the  wind,  which  is  the  forest's  very  essence  or  spirit. 

We  have  been  thinking  at  present  of  the  western  side  of 

1  The  Lombardic  name  is  Gwodan  (Paul.,  Diac,  i.  9);  the  Saxon, 
Woden  {Forma  Abrenunt.  in  Pertz's  Leges,  i.,  and  Merseburg  Formula); 
the  English,  Wodin  (Saxon  Chronicle)  ;\he  Scandinavian,  Odin.  As  the 
English  form  is  the  most  familiar,  it  will  be  the  one  employed  hereafter. 


46  CREED  OF  HEATHEN  GERMANY. 

Germany,  of  those  forests  which  had  known  the  presence 
of  Roman  soldiers,  where  Germanicus  had  found  the  bones 
of  slain  legionaries  whitening  on  the  trees.  As  we  passed 
from  this  region  to  the  east  and  north,  towards  the  Baltic 
shores,  we  should  exchange  the  mixed  forests  of  hard  wood 
and  firs  for  forests  which  were  almost  entirely  '  black ' — 
i.e.,  of  fir  or  pine.  For  the  sandy  soil  of  North  Germany  will 
scarcely  support  a  hardier  and  tardier  growth.  If  the  birthplace 
of  Wodin  really  were  near  the  modern  Spreewald,  then  that 
birth  must  have  taken  place  in  a  black  forest. 

If  in  these  days  we  wish  to  feel  the  mystic  presence  of  the 
Great  God  of  the  Germans,  we  must  do  as  our  worshipping 
forefathers  did,  withdraw  from  the  concourse  of  men,  find  out 
some  forest  solitude,  and  wait  there.  Let  it  be,  if  you  will, 
in  one  of  the  great  stretches  of  woodland  which  are  to  be  found 
in  East  and  West  Prussia  ;  or,  better  still  nowadays,  go  to 
the  vast  primeval  forests  which  lie  upon  the  upper  slopes  of  the 
Scandinavian  peninsula,  far  away  from  the  fjords  and  the  too 
frequent  steps  of  tourists.  There  you  will  feel,  as  you 
should,  the  strange  and  awful  stillness  which  from  time  to 
time  reigns  in  pine-forests  such  as  these.  Presently  the 
quiet  is  broken,  first  by  a  sigh  which  arises,  as  from  the  ground 
itself,  and  breathes  throughout  the  wood.  Anon,  from  a 
distance  a  sound  is  heard  so  like  the  sound  of  the  sea  that 
you  might  swear  (had  you  never  been  in  such  a  wood  before)  that 
you  could  hear  the  waves  drawing  backwards  over  a  pebbly 
beach.  As  it  approaches  the  sound  grows  into  a  roar;  it  is 
the  roar  of  the  tempest,  the  coming  of  Wodin. 

I  can  imagine  that  the  sealike  sound  of  the  forest  wind  may 
have  been  in  part  the  reason  why  the  Scandinavian  Odin 
appears  sometimes  as  a  sea-god,  or  at  least  as  a  god  who  has 
a  home  beneath  the  sea.  'Sunkbench  (Sokkvabekk?-)?  says  an 
Eddie  poem  describing  the  palaces  of  the  gods — - 


WODIN  AND  THE  FOREST  WIND,  47 

Sunkbench  is  called  tbe  fourth,  which  the  cold  waves 

Ever  murmur  above  : 
There  Odin  and  Saga  l  drink  all  day  long 

Gladly  from  golden  cups.  2 

Another,  however,  and  a  stronger  reason  is  that  Odin's  wife, 
Frigg,  who  is  the  Nerthus  of  Tacitus,3  is  in  part  a  goddess  of 
the  sea — though  she  is  still  more  an  earth-goddess.  And 
when  in  mythology  a  god  and  goddess  are  married,  each 
necessarily  acquires  some  portion  of  the  nature  of  the  other. 
How  Nerthus  comes  to  be  a  goddess  both  of  the  earth  and 
sea  is  no  doubt  a  matter  which  needs  some  inquiry,  but  we 
have  no  space  for  it  here.  That  she  is  so  seems  almost 
certain.  It  is  Tacitus  who  calls  her  Nerthus,  and  adds,  *  id  est 
Terra  mater?  But  that  very  word  Nerthus  must  be  connected 
with  Njord  of  the  Eddie  mythology;  and  Njord  most  certainly 
was  a  god  of  the  sea.  Frigg  appears  clearly  as  an  earth- 
goddess  :  but  her  palace  is  Fensalir,  '  Fen-Hall,'  or  even 
'  Wave-Hall.' 

And  now  we  return  to  Wodin  and  the  forest  wind. 

It  will  be  said  by  some  that  this  description  is  purely 
imaginary.  I  make  a  distinction  between  what  is  imaginative 
and  what  is  imaginary.  If  you  choose  not  to  go  into  the 
study  of  mythology  or  of  beliefs  of  any  kind  till  you  have 
first  stripped  yourself  of  your  imagination,  you  will  travel 
indeed  lightly  burdened,  and  you  will  arrive  at  strange  re- 
sults. Because,  as  belief  of  all  kinds  is  born  of  the  imagina- 
tion, and  Aberglaube  is,  as  Goethe  says,  the  poetry  of  life,  you 
will  have  taken  the  precaution  of  going  into  the  dark  unpro- 
vided with  a  lantern.  To  avoid  doing  this  you  are  not  obliged, 
however,  to  give  free  rein  to  your  fancy.     Nor  have  we  done 

1  The  Seeress.  2  Grimnismdl  7  (Bugge)  {Corp.  Poet.  Bor.,  i.  70). 

3  Proved  to  be  so  by  her  relations  to  the  Lombards.  Cf.  Tacitus, 
Ger??iania,  40,  and  Paul.,  Diac,  i.  8. 


48  CREED  OF  HEATHEN  GERMANY. 

so  here.  Pat  shortly,  the  case  stands  thus  :  We  know  that  the 
Germans  lived  a  forest  life,  that  their  groves  were  their  temples, 
that  they  did  not,  as  a  rule,  make  images  of  the  gods,  that  they 
did  not  even  imagine  their  Great  God  visible  to  sight,  but 
thought  of  him  as  an  unseen  {secrehwi)  presence.  But  they 
must  have  been  strangely  advanced  in  their  religious  notions, 
and  on  that  side  quite  out  of  pace  with  their  culture  in  other 
respects,  if  they  could  dispense  with  all  sensuous  apprehension 
of  their  divinity.  I  do  not  think,  therefore,  a  picture  which 
would  make  some  of  the  Teutons  identify  their  Great  God 
with  a  visible  great  tree,  oak  or  ash  or  pine,  and  others  more 
imaginative,  hear  and  feel  his  presence  in  the  forest  wind,  so 
deserving  of  the  epithet  imaginary,  as  a  theory  which  would 
give  the  god  a  naine  and  nothing  more,  no  sensible  reality 
at  all. 

Nay,  it  would  require  some  strong  argument  to  show  that 
Odin,  who  is  a  god  of  battles  before  he  is  anything  else,  who 
rides  through  the  air  on  the  swiftest  of  horses,  whose  son  is 
the  Thunder-god,  his  son  and  his  comrade  in  battle,  was  not 
the  god  who  rode  on  the  whirlwind  and  directed  the  storm. 
For  men  have  at  all  times — and  of  this  their  language  is 
the  best  witness — confounded  the  storm  and  the  fury  of 
battle,  the  storm  of  battle,  I  might  say,  with  the  battle  of  the 
elements. 

The  storm  of  spears  and  Odin's  wrath 

is  the  name  for  battle  in  the  Edda  songs. 

There  was  a  sound  familiar  to  the  Roman  soldier  of  the 
later  empire,  in  days  when  the  greater  part  of  the  Roman 
soldiery  were  of  barbarian  origin.  It  was  called  barritus,  a 
word  which  is  said  to  be  a  German  gloss ; x  it  is  certainly  not 

1  Forcellini,  s.v. 


THE  BARRITUS.  49 

a  Latin  one.  If  the  word  is  German,  then  the  barritus  must 
be  a  German  institution.  This  was  the  manner  of  it.  It  was 
raised  by  the  Roman  legionaries  before  going  into  battle  ;  and 
it  seems  to  have  been  made  by  placing  the  rim  of  the  shield 
below  the  mouth,  and  then  raising  a  long  more  or  less 
musical  howl  or  cry,  the  shield  serving  as  a  sounding-board. 
The  barritus  began  in  a  gentle  murmur  and  gradually  swelled 
to  a  great  body  of  sound,  audible  afar  off,  and  expressly  com- 
pared by  some  of  the  classical  writers  to  the  roar  of  the  sea. 
The  soldiers  augured  well  or  ill  of  the  success  of  the  coming 
battle,  according  as  the  barritus  rose  haimoniously  into  full 
swell  or  no.  The  sound  must  have  been  the  very  counterpart 
of  the  sound  of  the  wind  in  a  pine-forest.  It  may  be,  it  even 
seems  to  be,  this  very  practice  and  this  very  sound  which  is 
referred  to  in  an  Eddie  poem,  where  Odin  is  made  to  say 
of  his  favourites  going  into  battle — 

I  sing  under  their  shields.1 

All  depends,  I  know,  upon  whether  it  be  decided  that  the  barri- 
tus really  was  a  German  institution,  and  that  seems  to  depend 
more  than  anything  upon  the  etymology  of  the  word — a 
question  upon  which  I  am  not  capable  of  speaking.  There 
are  considerable  difficulties  in  the  way  of  accepting  it ;  and  I 
give  this  illustration  only  for  what  it  may  be  worth.  It  illus- 
trates the  character  of  Wodin  as  a  god  of  battles;  it  is  not 
needed  to  establish  it.2 

1  Hdvamdt,  19  [Corp.  P.B.)  'under  randir  ek  gol' — which  we  might 
translate  'under  their  shields  I  yell.'  Comp.  the  description  of  the  bar- 
ditus  in  Tacitus,  G.  3.      But  see  next  note. 

2  Grimm  first  suggested  the  reading  of  barritus  for  bardiius  in  Germ  3. 
He  was  followed  by  Orelli.  But  I  believe  there  is  no  MS.  authority  for  the 
change.  '  Bard,'  a  poet,  is  a  Celtic  not  a  Teutonic  word.  Barritus  is 
believed  to  be  a  Teutonic  gloss  (see  Forcellini,  s. v.)  However  that  may 
be,  it  is  not  spoken  of  by  the  classical   writers  as  used  by  the  German 

5 


50  CREED  OF  HEATHEN  GERMANY. 

Add  to  the  foregoing  picture  that  Wodin  sometimes  wanders 
over  the  earth  in  a  more  peaceful  character;  that  he  visits 
men  in  their  homes,  when  they  do  not  know  him,  and  at  such 
times  takes  the  form  of  an  old  grey  man,  one-eyed,  wrapped 
in  a  cloak.  This  we  may  take  to  be  the  wind  visiting  the 
earth  in  a  gentler  fashion. 

III. 

Thor  or  Donar,  the  god  next  greatest  after  Wodin,  nobody 
has  ever  questioned  was  the  Thunder;  for  his  German  name 
has  remained  unchanged.  And  looking  upon  Odin  as  the 
tempest  of  the  air,  it  is  appropriate  enough  that  Thorr  is  a 
son  of  Odin  and  of  Earth  (HldSyn) ;  that  he  does  not  ride 
a-horseback  through  the  clouds,  but  thunders  over  the  hills  in 
his  chariot.  Thorr  is  red-bearded;  from  the  flash  of  light- 
ning. He  is  the  parent  of  more  than  one  Rodbard  (Rothbart), 
Robert  or  Robin  of  Middle  Age  romance.  To  us  he  is  most 
familiar  as  wielder  of  the  hammer  of  Thor,  the  bolt ;  mjolnir, 
the  crusher,  it  was  called  in  the  north.  It  is  on  this  account  that 
he  is  called  Hercules  by  Tacitus ;  Wodin,  as  we  know,  being 
identified  with  Mercury.  Jupiter  is  the  true  equivalent  for 
Thor,  and  this  equivalence  was  recognized  by  the  Germans 
of  the  border  when  they  adopted  the  Roman  week  of  seven 


barbarians,  but  by  the  soldiers  (very  probably  of  German  origin  no  doubt) 
in  the  Roman  army.  The  wild  howling  of  the  Goths  was  answered  by  the 
more  rhythmic  sound  of  the  barritus,  is  what  Ammian  says,  speaking  of  the 
battle  of  Marcianopolis.  We  also  hear  of  the  same  sound  being  raised 
by  the  Roman  soldiers  in  Mesopotamia.  There  is  nothing,  of  course,  in 
all  this  to  prove  that  the  barritus  was  not  a  Teutonic  barbarian  invention. 
Rydberg  assumes,  without  hesitation,  that  it  was  a  war-cry  familiar  to  all  the 
Germans.  The  barritus  is  mentioned  in  the  following  places  in  Ammian, 
xvi.  12,  48  ;  \xi.  13,  15  ;  xxvi.  7,  17  ;  xxxi.  7,  II.  Many  of  the  occasions 
on  which  it  was  used  were  (it  will  be  seen)  by  the  Romans  troops  in  the 
East. 


THOR,  TIU.  5 1 

days,  but  named  the  days  after  their  own  divinities — Thors-day, 
Wodins  day,  Tius-day,  Freyjas-day,  and  so  forth.1 

By  the  side  of  Wodin  Thor  is  a  somewhat  rustic  figure.  He 
has  been  spoken  of  as  the  peasant's  god,  or  say  rather  the 
franklin's  or  the  bonder's  god,  whereas  Odin  is  the  warrior's 
godpar  excellence,  the  god  of  the  thane,  the  earl,  or  the  prince, 
the  begetter  of  royal  houses.  It  cannot,  however,  be  said  that 
this  distinction  always  holds.2  There  is  evidence  that  Thor 
was  cherished  more  even  than  Wodin  in  the  popular  myth- 
ology of  the  Middle  Ages.  And,  strange  to  say,  this  cherishing 
has  in  his  case  taken  away  from  his  reputation  in  our  eyes. 
He  is,  in  reality,  more  familiar  to  us  than  any  other  god 
of  the  northern  pantheon,  for  he  is  the  hero  of  half  the 
nursery  stories  of  giants  and  trolls.  But  that  is  a  familiarity 
which  brings  with  it  contempt ;  and  it  would  be  impossible 
now-a-days  to  invest  either  Thor  or  his  antagonists  the  giants 
(jolnar)  with  one  tithe  of  the  seriousness,  or  even  majesty, 
which  they  once  possessed  for  the  Teutonic  mind. 

The  third  of  Tacitus'  triad,  whom  he  calls  Mars,  is  Tiu 
or  This,  or,  in  the  north,  Tyr.  But  though  Tiu  was  a  great 
god  with  the  Germans  in  Tacitus's  day,  he  has  sunk  to  be  a 
rather  shadowy  person  in  the  Edda  mythology,  and  the  traces 
of  him  in  local  names  and  popular  legends  are  very  much 
fewer  than  in  the  case  of  Wodin  or  Thor.  In  days  much 
more  distant  than  those  of  Tacitus,  Tiu  must  have  (one 
thinks)  been  the  supreme  divinity  of  the  Teutons.     And  we 

1  Sunday  is  probably  really  taken  from  the  Roman  sun-worship,  not  from 
any  god  in  the  Teutonic  pantheon,  and  Monday  in  like  manner.  Saturday 
may  likewise  be  from  the  Roman  Saturn. 

2  There  is,  in  fact,  plenty  of  evidence  of  Thor  being  placed  before  Odin 
in  the  hierarchy  of  many  of  the  Teutonic  nations.  Cf.  Dudo,  bk.  i.,  and 
the  Forma  abremtntiationis  in  Pertz,  Leg.  i. :  '  Ec  forsacho  allum  dioboles 
wercum  end  wordum,  Thunaer  ende  Woden  ende  Saxnote'  (  =  Tyr?)  Ac- 
cording to  Adam  of  Bremen  Odin  was  essentially  a  god  of  battles  ; 
Thor  a  protector  against  sickness,  loco  czr, 


52  CREED  OF  HEATHEN  GERMANY. 

can  thus  trace  his  decline  through  three  stages.  But  as  we 
have  no  picture  of  him  in  his  days  of  greatness,  we  cannot 
say  much  concerning  his  character.  In  the  Eddas  Tyr  is 
a  rather  shadowy  counterpart  of  Odin  ;  and  his  name  (one 
proof  of  his  former  greatness)  is  used  very  often  as  the 
abstract  name  for  god.  Thus  fimbul-tyr,  great  tyr,  great  god, 
when  used  in  the  Eddas,  does  not  mean  this  divinity,  but 
Odin. 

In  revenge  for  this  decline  of  the  Mars-god  in  Tacitus' 
triology,  we  gain  from  the  Eddie  Pantheon  two  other  gods 
of  great  importance,  of  whom  the  classical  writers  give  but 
slight  hints.  These  are  Frey  and  Balder,  beings  very  much 
alike  in  character,  one  of  whom  certainly  was  known  to  the 
continental  Germans.  As  Balder  or  Phol  the  god  appears  in 
one  of  the  two  incantations  which  I  have  said  are  almo  t  the 
only  genuine  documents  of  German  heathendom  which  have 
come  down  to  our  day.  From  that  single  fragment  we  can 
form  no  conception  of  the  place  which  Balder  held  in  the 
creed  of  heathen  Germany.  In  the  Norse  mythology  he  is  a 
young  god,  young  and  remarkably  beautiful,  and  fair  in  com- 
plexion ;  he  is  essentially  a  god  of  peace.  He  is  generally 
spoken  of  as  one  that  is  already  dead,  who  has  descended 
into  the  lower- world — to  a  place  of  mild  happiness  not  of 
torture1 — to  Hades  not  Gehenna,  therefore — has  gone  down 
into  Hell  in  that  older  significance  of  the  phrase  which  our 
prayer-books  have  retained.  He  is  to  come  again,  moreover, 
according  to  the  Eddie  myth,  after  the  destruction  of  the  world 
at  Ragnarok,  and  reign  over  a  renovated  earth.  Altogether 
Balder  is  endowed  by  the  Edda  poets  with  so  many  of  the 
attributes  and  so  much  of  the  history  of  the  'White  Christ,' 
that  we  cannot  now  say  how  far  he  is  to  be  looked  upon  as  a  real 

1  See  Rydberg,  Teutonic  Mythol.  248,  sqq. 


BALDER,  FREY.  53 

creation  of  ancient  German  belief.  But  then  we  must  remember 
that  this  '  White  Christ,'  known  to  the  sagas,  has  evidently 
borrowed  something  from  the  native  god  Balder.  So  we  may 
say,  perhaps,  that  though  the  milder  aspects  of  this  god  of  the 
Peace-steads  have  been  emphasied,  they  have  not  been  in- 
vented, and  that  Balder  was  from  the  beginning  (like  Frey)  a 
god  of  spring  and  of  the  sun,  of  vegetation  and  of  the  blessings 
of  the  soil. 

Frey  is  much  more  genuinely  heathen  than  Balder,  but 
likewise  more  exclusively  Scandinavian.  He  is  to  be  wor- 
shipped, the  Gylfaginnitigx  tells  us,  '  for  good  harvests  and 
for  peace.'  He,  too,  is  evidently  a  god  of  sunshine  and  of 
spring.  At  Upsala  Frey  formed  one  of  a  triology,  which 
included  Odin  and  Trior,  excluding  Tyr;2  the  three  grave- 
mounds  of  these  gods  are  still  shown  there.  Frey  was,  too,  the 
progenitor  of  the  Yngling  race,  which  ruled  in  Sweden  and  in 
Norway.  That  there  was  some  being  like  him  in  character 
among  the  gods  of  the  ancient  Germans  we  must  believe ;  most 
probably  this  was  Balder,  so  that  Frey  can  hardly  be  classed 
among  the  divinities  of  the  ancient  Germans. 

For  the  peaceable  side  of  life,  however,  the  principal 
divinities  would  naturally  be  those  of  the  female  sex.  Nerthus 
is  the  most  important  of  that  number  whose  name  can  be 
recovered.  She,  as  we  knowr  (like  Balder  in  this),  proclaimed 
peace  wherever  she  went.  She  was,  as  we  have  already  seen, 
not  unlike  the  Demeter  of  the  Greeks;  she  had  apparently 
her  myth  of  wandering,  and  her  Triptolemus-myth,  the  mission 
of  Skef  as  the  civilizer  of  mankind.  And  if  we  take  the 
analogy  of  the  Eddie  religion,  we  may  believe  that  by  the  side  of 
this  matronly  goddess,  Terra  Mater,   stood  a  younger  one — 

x  Younger  Edda  {Edda  Snorrd).  *  Adam  of  Bremen  loco  cit. 


54  CREED  OF  HEATHEN  GERMANY. 

a  sort  of  Persephone  —  formed,  so  to  say,  out  of  the  elder 
chthonic  being.  We  know  how  difficult  it  is  in  Greek  art, 
and  the  more  difficult  the  farther  we  go  back,  to  distinguish 
between  Demeter  and  Persephone.1  A  similar  confusion  of 
mother  and  daughter,  of  older  and  younger  goddess,  is  repre- 
sented in  the  likeness  in  name  between  Frigg,  the  wife  of 
Odin,  and  Freyja,  the  daughter  of  Njord,  the  sister  and 
feminine  counterpart  of  Frey.2  There  are  other  names  for  the 
matron  goddess,  Mother-earth,  in  the  German  mythology. 
Perchta,  Bertha  is  one,  a  name  which  survived  late  in  German 
folk-lore.  But  we  are  not  concerned,  happily,  with  the  names 
of  our  divinities ;  were  it  so  the  obscurities  and  ramifications 
of  our  subject  would  be  increased  a  hundredfold. 

Tacitus  speaks  of  another  goddess  worshipped  by  a  part 
of  the  Suevi.  But  he  does  not  give  her  native  name.  He 
calls  her  Isis.  Pars  Suevorum  et  Isidi  sacrificat.  That  this 
Isis  was  essentially  different  from  Nerthus  we  cannot  believe. 
She  was  probably  only  the  Earth-mother  looked  at  from  a 
different  point  of  view,  of  which  we  have  next  to  speak. 

For  the  everyday  creed  of  the  ancient  Germans,  we  must 
be  content  with  the  faint  outlines  which  we  have  been  able  to 
draw — with  the  awful  War-god  of  the  grove;  sometimes  how- 
ever seen  in  a  milder  aspect  as  a  wanderer  among  the  homes 
of  men  ;  with  Thunder  driving  in  his  chariot  over  the  hills  ;  and 
with  other  divinities  of  less  importance,  who  fight  at  his  side 
and  at  the  side  of  Wodin.     Then  with  a  peaceful  spring  god 

1  E.g.,  in  the  Harpy  Tomb  from  Xanthos  in  the  British  Museum.  See  on 
this  subject  Gerhardt,  Gr.  Myth.  §  240,  4;  and  in  Akad.  Abt.  ii.  357  ;  and 
Overbeck,  Gr.  Ktmstmyth.  ii.  442,  448. 

2  Freyja  is  the  daughter  of  Njord,  who  is  the  male  counterpart  of 
Nerthus  as  Frey  of  Freyja.  Therefore  Nerthus  may  as  easily  be  identi- 
fied with  Freyja  as  with  Frigg.  Frigg,  like  Freyja,  belongs  to  the  race  of 
the  Vanir,  not  to  that  of  the  /Esir.  1  do  not  know  whether  any  connection 
has  ever  been  suggested  between  Nerthus  and  Nirrtis,  the  Chthonic  goddess 
of  the  Risr  Veda. 


GODDESSES.  55 

who  can  wield  arms  well  enough  if  called  upon.  And,  finally, 
with  Mother-Earth,  who  like  her  husband  Wodin,  is  at  times 
a  wanderer  among  mankind,  who  loves  peace  and  happy 
festivals,  but  about  whom  there  is  likewise  something  mysterious 
and  terrible — '  a  holy  ignorance  and  mysterious  horror '  as 
Tacitus  says.  Whence  came  this  fear  and  mystery  ?  we  will 
now  ask. 

IV. 

There  is  to  every  creed  another  side  beside  its  familiar  every- 
day aspect ;  and  there  was  such  to  the  creed  of  the  ancient  Ger- 
mans. It  had  a  mysterious,  a  mystic  or  magical  side.  In  this 
the  chief  parts  were  played  by  Wodin  and  Nerthus.  That  pro- 
cession of  the  goddess  Nerthus,  as  it  is  described  to  us,  partakes 
of  the  nature  of  a  dramatic  representation,  a  symbol  of  the 
mythic  wanderings  of  the  Earth-mother,  in  just  the  same  way 
that  the  Eleusinian  journey  symbolized  the  wanderings  of  the 
Greek  Mother-Earth.  And  when  we  find  Tacitus  telling  us  that 
pars  Suevorum  worshipped  Isis,  we  must  suppose  that  he  recog- 
nized for  that  goddess,  at  any  rate  (whether  he  had  Nerthus  in 
his  mind  or  no),  that  she  stood  at  the  head  of  a  mystery.  For 
the  Romans  only  knew  Isis  as  a  goddess  worshipped  in  this 
fashion.  It  would  be  impossible  for  a  Roman  author  to  speak 
of  a  German  goddess  as  Isis,  unless  he  thought  he  saw  a 
mystery  connected  with  her  worship. 

I  use  the  word  '  mystery '  here  in  a  very  definite  sense.  I 
do  not  mean  merely  that  there  was  something  awful  and  hidden 
or  half  understood  about  the  divinity.  That  may  be  predi 
cated  of  any  god.  I  mean  that  there  were  connected  with 
certain  selected  divinities,  ceremonies  which  were  recognized 
to  be  in  a  special  sense  mysterious  and  holy,  possessing 
magical  properties,  conferring  miraculous  powers,  needing  a 
selected  body  of  priests  or  priestesses  to  keep  up  the  tradition 
of  them,  and  transmit  their  divine  influence. 


$6  CREED  OF  HEATHEN  GERMANY. 

It  is  the  special  note  of  a  mystery  that  it  so  often  outlives 
the  stage  of  belief  in  which  it  had  its  origin  and  to  which  it 
naturally  belongs.  We  know  how  eminently  this  was  the  case 
with  the  classical  mysteries,  especially  with  two  of  them,  the 
Mysteries  of  Isis  and  the  Eleusinia.  It  is  reckoned  that  we  can 
trace  the  history  of  the  latter  almost  absolutely  unchanged  for 
a  thousand  years.1  No  creed  could  well  remain  the  same  for 
so  long,  least  of  all  among  the  quick-witted  Greeks.  The 
Eleusinia  long  survived  the  official  recognition  of  Christianity  ; 
they  were  finally  uprooted  by  the  monks  coming  into  Greece 
in  the  wake  of  Alaric's  invading  army  in  a.d.  391.  Much  the 
same  was  the  history  of  the  mysteries  of  Isis  and  Serapis,2 
which  after  they  had  already  been  transmitted  through  countless 
centuries,  Egypt  bequeathed — in  a  changed  form  no  doubt — 
to  Rome,  and  which  Rome  adopted  when  her  own  beliefs  were 
fading.  It  is  the  same,  if  I  may  be  permitted  to  say  so,  with 
the  Christian  mysteries,  which  are  essentially  primitive  and 
mediaeval  in  character^  and  not  really  in  harmony  with  the 
Christianity  of  to-day. 

If  therefore  we  find,  as  we  do,  a  ceremony  almost  identical 
with  the  ceremony  of  the  progress  of  Nerthus  surviving  in  a 
part  of  Lower  Germany  as  late  as  the  twelfth  century,  and 
recognized  by  the  Christian  writers  of  that  time  as  a  survival 
of  heathenism,  we  have  strong  confirmatory  evidence  of  the 
mystic  significance  attaching  to  the  acted  progress  of  the  Earth 
goddess.4 

1  P.  R.  Forster,  Raub  u.  Ruckkeh>  der  Persephone.  If  we  were  to  follow 
the  anthropological  method  (a  loose  -  ne  g  nerally)  of  tracing  some  part  of 
the  ceremonies  to  savage  customs,  the  period  might  of  course  be  extended 
almost  indefinitely. 

*  Serapis,  of  course,  is  only  a  Roman  divinity  under  this  name,  which  is 
a  corruption  of  Apis. 

3  As  we  shall  have  hereafter  some  occasion  to  note.      See  Chap.  XVL 

4  See  Chron.  Rudolfi  Abb.  Sanct.  Trud.  (Pertz,  xii.  309)  and  Grimm 
A  M.  i.  214. 


MYSTERIES.  57 

And  I  myself — though  this  must  remain  a  matter  of  infer- 
ence only — have  very  little  doubt  that  the  story  of  the  boat- 
borne  Sceaf  is,  in  its  turn,  closely  connected  with  the  worship 
of  Nerthus,  and  that  we  have  here  another  mystery  associated 
with  the  parent  one,  much  as  the  story  of  Triptolemus  was 
associated  with  the  worship  of  Demeter. 


There  always  arises  a  certain  community  between  a  god  and 
the  goddess  who  is  his  wife.  Demeter  ought  no  doubt  as  a 
chthonic  divinity  to  be  married  to  a  god  of  Earth,  whereas  she 
is  married  to  a  god  of  Heaven.  But  then  her  other  self,  her 
daughter  is  married  to  the  chthonic  Aidoneus  ;  and  Demeter's 
husband  Zeus  himself  sometimes  shares  in  her  nature — there  is 
in  Greek  mythology  a  Zeus  Chthonios,  as  well  as  a  Zeus  of 
heaven. 

So  it  is  in  the  relations  between  Wodin  and  Nerthus ;  and 
the  point  at  which  meet  the  naturally  opposite  characters  of 
the  heavenly  War-god  and  the  peaceful  Earth,  is  where  we 
find  Wodin,  as  we  have  said  we  do  find  him,  wandering  over 
the  earth  disguised  as  an  old  man,  clad  very  often  in  beggar's 
weeds.  This  portrait  of  him  is  like  the  picture  of  Demeter  in 
her  wanderings,  sitting  down  in  the  guise  of  a  slave  near  the 
palace  of  Keleos.  Wodin  was  not  always  treated  so  well  as  was 
Demeter  by  Keleos's  daughters.  On  one  occasion  he  came  to 
ihe  house  of  a  king  GeirroS.  He  was  seized  as  a  beggar,  an 
outlaw,  and  placed  between  two  fires.  And  there  is  more  in 
this  story  than  meets  the  eye  at  first  sight,  for  by  a  comparison 
with  other  myths,  GeirroS  is  seen  to  be  a  sort  of  King  of  Death.1 

On  another  occasion  more  distantly  alluded  to,  Wodin  was 
still  worse  handled,  was  actually  hung,  as  an  outlaw  on  the 

1  The   Geruth   of  Gorm's   (the   northern   Odysseus')   voyage    in    Saxo 
Grammaticus  (Ed.  Miiller  and  VelschowJ  p.  420.     See  also  below. 


5  8  CREED  OF  HEATHEN  GERMANY. 

vargtre,  that  is  to  say,  upon  his  own  tree,  an  offering  to  himself 

In  one  of  the  earliest  Eddie  fragments  the  god  is  made  to 

say— 

I  know  that  I  hung  on  the  gallows  tree1 

Nine  nights  long  ; 
To  Odin  offered,  with  a  spear  wounded, 

Myself  to  myself.2 

These  myths  are  the  foundation  of  the  mysteries  of  Wodin. 

The  number  nine  was  an  especially  sacred  one  to  the 
Germans.  Their  original  week  was  one  of  nine  days.  We 
have  noted  some  instances  already  of  the  recurrence  of  the 
number.  In  the  Upsala  celebration  which  took  place  every 
ninth  year,  nine  of  each  kind  of  living  thing  was  offered.3  And 
with  this  picture  of  the  Upsila  sacrifice  in  our  thoughts,  we  * 
need  to  listen  to  the  mystic  verses  quoted  above. 

Nothing,  I  know,  is  more  misleading  in  ordinary  mythology 
(open-air  mythology,  if  I  may  use  the  expression),  than  a 
reliance  upon  chance  identity  of  numbers.  But  it  is  the 
peculiar  mark  of  mysteries  and  philosophies  of  a  mystic  kind 
that  numbers  have  in  them,  or  are  supposed  to  have,  a 
deep  meaning.  Juggling  with  numbers  is,  in  fact,  a  special 
form  of  magic  among  people  at  a  certain  stage  of  culture. 

It  is  possible  that  one  detail,  that  of  the  wounding  with  a 
spear,  may  be  a  semi-Christian  addition  to  the  picture  of  Wodin 
on  the  gallows-tree.*  But  I  do  not  think  the  picture,  as  a 
whole,  is  Christian,  but  genuinely  and  anciently  German,  con- 

1  '  On  the  gallows  tree,'  vin^a-meiffi  a.     See  ante  p.  43. 

2  Corp.  P.  B.  i.  24.      llavamal  (Edda,  Bugge)  138. 

3  Cf.  also  the  ninety-nine  victims  at  the  sacrifice  in  Leire,  which  also 
took  place  every  ninth  year.  Thietmari,  Chr.  i.  9  (Pertz,  iii.  739-40). 
There  were  nine  regions  in  Niflhel  (Vaff>.  43);  nine  giant-maids  of  the 
Ocean  or  Island  Mill  (Ey-liid)  [C.P.B.  ii.  54],  three  nines  of  maidens 
(Valkyriur)  ;  see  below. 

4  Rydberg  has  shown  that  there  was  nothing  antique  in  that  supposed 
custom  of  spear-risting. 


MYSTERY  OF  WODIN.  59 

nected  with  the  natural  character  of  the  god.  The  complete 
genealogy  of  the  ancient  rites  of  sacrifice  from  the  days  of  the 
grove  of  the  Semnones  to  the  time  of  the  sacrifices  in  the  grove 
at  Upsala,  is  clear  and  self-consistent,  and  does  not  admit  of  any 
Christian  element.  And  with  the  one  exception  of  the  passage 
1  with  a  spear  wounded,'  the  picture  of  Wodin  hung  upon  the 
vargtre^  and  offered  as  an  offering  to  himself,  is  on  all  fours 
with  these  ancient  rites.  The  story  of  the  mystery  alluded  to 
in  the  verse  just  quoted,  I  believe  to  be  only  a  variant  of  the 
story  of  Wodin  and  GeirroS. 

GeirroS,  we  have  said,  proves  to  be  a  god  of  the  under-world. 
Wodin,  when  he  had  hung  nine  nights  upon  the  vargtri,  de- 
scended (so  we  gather)  into  some  under-world,  and  brought 
thence  wisdom  or  inspiration  as  his  prize — nine  all-powerful 
Rune  songs — 

I  peered  down,  I  caught  up  the  Runes  ; 

Crying  I  caught  them  up,  down  I  descended ; 
Mighty  songs  nine  I  learned  from  the  far-famed  son 

Of  Balthorn,  Besli's  father.1 

There  are  to  be  found  very  many  stories  and  traces  of  more 
which  tell  of  Wodin's  descent  into  the  lower-world  for  the  sake 
of  bringing  up  wisdom  as  his  prize.  The  most  famed  descent 
was  that  to  the  well  of  Mimir,  a  king  of  a  portion  of  the  lower- 
world.  On  that  occasion  Wodin  had  to  leave  as  a  pledge  one 
of  his  eyes,  out  of  which  Mimir  made  a  cup  to  drink  from. 
It  is  only  a  variant  of  this  myth  which  is  alluded  to  in  the 
aboveverse — for  the  son  of  Balthorn  and  brother  of  Besli  is 
Mimir. 

This  story  of  Wodin's  descent  to  the  under-world  in  search 
of  magic  fits  in  well  enough  with  the  natural  character  of  the 

1  Hdv.  139,  140. 


60  CREED  OF  HE  A  THEN  GERMANY. 

supreme  God  of  the  Teutons.1  Wodin  is  first  the  Tempest-god, 
the  rusher  over  land  and  sea,  the  god  of  battle,  the  chooser  or 
warriors,  the  inspirer  of  battle  fury,  that  fury  to  which  the 
Northmen  gave  the  name  of  berserksgangr.  But  he  is,  secondly, 
the  wanderer  over  the  earth,  the  teacher  of  writing  (magic 
writing),  wisdom,  and  incantations.  If  Wodin  in  his  first  cha- 
racter commended  himself  best  to  the  warrior  portion  of  the 
population,  Wodin  in  his  second  character  would  be  worshipped 
more  by  the  peaceful  section ;  for  in  the  most  warlike  states 
there  always  is  a  peaceful  section  of  the  population.  Now  I 
think  it  might  be  shown  that  the  practice  of  mysteries  arises  in 
all  cases  out  of  ancient  rustic  rites,  rites  which  are  attached  to 
the  soil,  not  brought  in  by  conquerors. 

Among  the  Romans  under  the  Empire  the  conquered  races, 
Egyptians  and  Syrians,  supplied  the  bulk  of  magicians  and 
soothsayers;  the  Finns  did  the  same  for  the  Scandinavians. 
Always  the  weaker  part  of  the  population  possesses  and  guards 
these  mysteries  and  magic  rites.  It  might  be  urged  as  an  argu- 
ment that  the  Germans  were  autochthonous,  that  we  find  among 
them  the  women  as  chief  soothsayers.  This  fact  all  the  classical 
writers  witness. 

c  Caesar  found  that  the  reason  of  the  delay  [of  Ariovistus  in 
coming  to  an  engagement]  was  that  a  custom  prevailed  among 

1  Vigfgusson  thinks  that  Odin's  name  is  connected   with  the  root  6d, 
inspiration.     One  of  the  verses  of  Havamal  (160)  says  : — 

J>at  kann-ek  id"fimtanda  es  gol  fiodreyrir 
Dvergr  fyr  Dellings  durom. 

Vafyrudnismal  (24)  says  of  Delling  : — 

Dellingr  heitr  hann  es  Dags  fatfir. 

So  that  the  Great  inspirer  (I>i6<freyrir),  from  whom  Odin  gains  his 
wisdom,  dwells  at  the  edge  of  the  world,  or  say  below  the  edge  of  the 
world,  before  the  doors  of  the  house  of  day.     See  below  under  section  vii. 


WISE   WOMEN.  61 

the  Germans  of  waiting  till  their  women  have  declared  by 
sortelege  and  prophecy  whether  it  is  desirable  to  engage  in 
battle  or  not.' r  We  might  fill  a  chapter  with  quotations 
having  the  same  tendency.  In  the  day  of  the  revolt  of 
Civilis  we  know  how  the  inhabitants  of  the  Batavian  Island 
hung  upon  the  words  of  prophecy  coming  from  the  druda 
called  Veleda,  who  wdwelt  in  a  lonely  tower,  not  in  their  own 
country  but  among  the  Bructerii  higher  up  the  river.2 

The  succession  of  these  seeresses  among  the  Teutons  is  an 
apostolic  succession,  with  no  break,  no  essential  change  of 
character,  only  such  change  as  time  must  bring,  from  the  day 
of  the  wife  of  Ariovistus,  of  Veleda  or  Aurinia,  through  the 
days  of  a  certain  spae-wife,  Ota,  whom  we  discern  in  the  dim 
light  of  the  Viking  period  seated  upon  the  high  altar  of 
an  Irish  minster,  and  'giving  her  answers'  therefrom,  or  of 
the  last  of  the  wise-woman  among  the  Old  Germans,  of  whom 
we  discover  some  trace  in  a  chronicler  of  the  ninth  century,3 
onwards  to  the  heroines  of  the  Edda  lays,  Sigrdrifa  or  Bryn- 
hild,  Sigriin,  Svava,  Aslaug  and  the  rest.  Here  is  a  verse  from 
the  lay  of  one  of  these  heroines,  which  I  translate  on  account 
of  its  rare  beauty.  Sigrdrifa  is  here  the  spse-wife.  She  had  been 
disobedient  to  Odin  by  taking  the  wrong  side  in  a  contest 
between  two  princes,  and  for  that  reason  had  been  punished 
by  a  long  sleep,  or  by  death.  But  from  that  spell  the  hero 
of  the  lay  Sigrced  (Sigurd)  — like  his  after- type  who  awoke  the 
sleeping  beauty — aroused  her.     She  awoke  and  said — 

Long  have  I  slept,  long  in  slumber  lain, 

Long  the  spells  lie  on  men, 
Odin  has  bound  me  thus,  that  I  might  not 

Break  the  sleep -bands  4 


1  B.  G.  i.  50,  cf.  Dio  Cass,  xxxviii.  48. 

2  Tacitus,  Hist.  iv.  61. 

3  Thiota  byname,  cf.  Ann.  Fuldens,  a.d.  847.     She  was  a  contemporary 
of  Ota.     See  Chapter  VI.  4  Lit.,  '  slaves.' 


62  CREED  OF  HEATHEN  GERMANY. 

Hail  to  the  day,  hail  to  the  Sons  of  day  ! 

Hail  Night  and  Earth! 
Look  with  kind  eyes  over  us  twain, 

And  bless  us  as  here  we  sit. 
Hail  to  the  /Esir,  hail  the  Asynior  ! 

Hail  to  thee,  Mother  Earth  ! 
Grant  us  two  lovers  good  words  x  and  wisdom, 

And  healing  hands  while  we  live.2 

Then  follows   a   list    of  charms  which    Sigrdrifa    sang    over 
Sigurd  and  taught  him  to  repeat. 

Of  the  seeresses  who  exercised  so  widespread  an  influence 
and  filled  so  important  a  place  in  the  social  economy  of  the 
Teutons,  some  lived,  we  see,  as  mysterious  recluses  —  like 
the  Lady  Minnetrost  in  Fouque^s  Zauberring.  But  at  stated 
times  such  an  one  came  among  the  people.  Taking  her 
1  high  seat,'  she  sat  at  the  festivals,  as  Ota  on  the  high  altar 
at  Clonmacnoise,  and  people  came  one  by  one  before  her  to 
consult  the  oracle.  3  There  is  no  talk  of  any  special  frenzy 
like  that  of  the  Delphic  priestess.  But  the  seat  of  prophecy 
was  a  special  one,  capable  apparently  of  imparting  some  virtue 
to  the  Vala.  The  last  line  of  the  Voluspa,  nu  mun  hon  sd'Mvaz, 
1  now  must  she  descend,'  has  generally  been  interpreted  to 
refer  to  the  coming  down  from  this  high  seat.4  Sometimes 
she  went  from  place  to  place  in  her  car,  and  the  days  of  her 
coming  were  days  of  festival ;  altogether  the  picture  is  not 
unlike  the  picture  of  Nerthus  drawn  round  on  her  triumphal 


1  Lucky  words,  evcp^fiid?  The  word  used  is  simply  mdl,  speech.  It  may 
mean  runes  to  make  the  dead  speak. 

2  Sigrdrifum&l,  2-4.  In  C.  P.  B.  better  arranged  under  the  heading 
of  the  Old  Play  of  the  Wohtmgs,  i.  40. 

3  Cf.  Vigfusson  Icel.  Diet.  s.v.  Volva. 

4  Though  it  must  be  allowed  that  sokkva  hardly  bears  such  an  interpre- 
tation, and  Rydberg  gives  it  a  different  one.  The  line  rather  suggests  that 
the  Volva  has  been  raised  from  the  under-world. 


A  GUILD  OF  PROPHETESSES.  63 

course ;  the  Vala  may  be  considered  as  a  visible  representative 
of  the  goddess,  for  Nerthus  herself,  as   we  know,  was  always 
hidden  from  view.      There  can  be  little   doubt  that  Nerthus 
was  a  partner  in  the  mysteries,  and  like  her  human  represen 
tative  especially  gifted  in  magic  arts. 


V. 

The  investigation  of  the  preceding  section  may  discover  to 
us,  or  reasonably  suggest,  the  existence  of  a  sort  of  guild  or 
college  of  prophetesses,  devoted  in  a  rather  peculiar  way  to 
the  worship  of  Wodin  and  of  Nerthus  or  Frigg  :  in  rather  a 
peculiar  way,  I  mean,  because  they  worshipped  the  former  in 
his  character  as  the  god  of  wisdom  and  magic,  as  what  an 
anthropologist  would  call  the  great  medicine- man.  They 
might  disobey  him  after  they  had  been  initiated,  as  Cassandra 
refused  to  pay  Apollo  the  price  of  her  gift  of  prophecy. 
Sigrdrifa  disobeyed  Odin  by  siding  with  Agnar  against  Odin's 
favourite  Helm-Gunnar.  But  this  freedom  did  not  prevent 
the  seeresses  being  as  a  body  the  maidens  of  Odin.  They 
were  not  all  vestals ;  many  were  married,  like  Ariovistus'  wife, 
or  the  above-mentioned  Ota,  whose  husband  was  a  Viking 
leader,  Thorgisl.  It  would,  one  can  imagine,  give  no  small 
prestige  to  a  king  or  leader  could  he  secure  one  of  these 
prophetesses  for  a  wife. 

So  far  for  this  belief,  and  the  rites  which  had  belonged  to  it  in 
early  days,  while  it  was  still  attached  to  the  more  peaceful  side 
of  Wodin's  character.  But  it  was  inevitable  that  the  warrior's 
creed  should  take  possession  of  this  also.  The  Vala's  wisdom 
though  acquired  at  times  of  peace  would  be  from  the  first 
railed  into  use  in  times  of  war.  Therefore  when  Wodin,  from 
the  homely  mysterious  wanderer  on  earth,  changed  back  to 
be  the    battle-god,   riding    on   the   whirlwind,   his    college    of 


64  CREED  OF  HEATHEN  GERMANY. 

maidens  was  transferred  from  earth  to  heaven.  They  were 
accredited  with  the  same  powers  of  riding  the  storm.  In 
virtue  of  these  they  became  the  troop  of  the  helm-maidens 
of  Odin,  the  northern  Amazons,  who  appear  in  the  Eddas. 
There  they  are  called  Valkyriur  or  '  Choosers  of  the  slain.' 
As  Odin  rode  through  the  clouds  on  his  eight-footed  horse 
Sleipnir,  so  did  the  Valkyriur,  too,  ride  on  white  horses 
through  the  air.  They  had  a  nature-side  to  their  character : 
they  were  identified  sometimes  with  the  clouds.  This  we  see 
from  a  verse  of  the  Eddie  poetry,  not  less  beautiful  than  that 
which  I  quoted  just  now. 

Three  troops1  of  maidens  (says  one  poem),  though  one  maid  foremost  rode, 

A  white  and  helmed  maid. 
Their  horses  shook  themselves,  and  from  their  manes  there  fell 

Dew  in  the  deep  dales,  on  the  high  trees  hail. 

I  take  it  that  the  descent  of  these  northern  Valkyriur  from 
the  ancient  race  of  German  prophetesses  is  continuous,  and 
such  as  presents  no  reasonable  grounds  for  scepticism.  The 
Valkyriur  were  just  as  much  Volvas,  wise-women,  as  was  any 
Veleda  or  Aurinia  of  ancient  times.  Wodin,  again,  as  the  god 
of  magic,  must  have  been  connected  with  these  Veledas  or 
Aurinias  just  as  much  as  we  know  Odin  to  have  been  connected 
with  a  Sigrdrifa  or  Svava,  whom  we  meet  with  in  the  Edda. 

When  the  Valkyriur  aid  not  ride  through  the  air  on  horses 
they  changed  themselves  into  birds,  more  particularly  into 
swans. 

Our  northern  poetry  is  full  of  the  swan,  the  most  poetic  of 
all  the  birds  which  haunt  the  Baltic  shores  and  bays.  In 
that  region  is  indigenous  the  singing  swan,  a  variety  which 
has  some  essential  differences  of  construction  from  the  mute 

1  Lit.,  '  Three  nines  of  maidens.'  See  above.  The  three  swan-maidens 
of  the  Volundakvi&a  abode  with  their  lovers  till  the  ninth  year,  v.  3. 


S  IVANS  AND  S  IVAN-MAIDENS.  65 

swan,  the  only  kind  which  we  know  upon  our  lakes  and  rivers. 
It  raises  its  clear  trumpet  notes  while  it  flies  and  wheels  in 
flocks ;  it  migrates  southward,  and  is  seen  upon  the  v^Egean, 
but  it  does  not  belong  to  the  south.  This  swan  was  the  first 
messenger  who  came  from  the  north  to  the  south,  preceding 
by  so  many  years  the  hordes  of  warriors  who  travelled  in  its 
wake,  bringing  from  a  part  of  the  world  unknown  that  lay 
which  has  made  the  swan  the  emblem  of  the  poet  in  every 
land ; — ■ 

Multa  Dircseum  levat  aura  cycnum, 
Tendit,  Antoni,  quoties  in  altos 
Nubium  tractus. 

The  Teutonic  name  of  the  swan  comes  from  this  faculty  of 
singing,  and  shows  us  that  our  forefathers  knew  the  singing  swan 
better  than  we  do.1  They  connected  the  swan,  moreover,  much 
more  with  the  sea  than  we  do ;  calling  the  sea,  for  example, 
the  '  swan's  road,'  an  expression  which  occurs  in  Beowulf. 
Therefore  the  swan  would  be  a  not  inappropriate  bird  for 
a  goddess  like  Nerthus,  who  came  over  the  sea,  and  was  in 
part  a  sea-goddess.  There  are  three  things  which  connect 
Nerthus  with  the  swan  :  one,  the  fact  that  her  Liebling  Sceaf 
appears  in  Middle  Age  tradition  as  the  swan-knight :  another, 
that  her  alter  ego  the  old  German  Perchta,  Bertha,  appears  like- 
wise in  Middle  Age  tradition  as  Bertha  with  the  swan-feet ;  a 
third,  that,  NjorS,  the  male  counterpart  of  Nerthus  (of  a  later 
age),  is  likewise  specially  connected  with  swans.2 

There  was  every  reason  therefore  why  the  shield-maidens 
of  Wodin,  if  they  were  connected  with  Wodin  and  Nerthus,  as 

1  Mullenhoff,  Deutsche  Alterthk.  beginning. 
a  '  The  howl  of  the  wolf 
To  my  ears  sounded  ill 
By  the  song  of  the  swan  ' — 
this    was  Njorft's  complaint  when  compelled  to  spend  half  his  time  in 
the  mountains  with  his  wife,  a  daughter  of  the  mountains. 


66  CREED  OF  HEATHEN  GERMANY. 

the  god  and  goddess  of  magic,  should  have  the  power  of 
changing  themselves  into  swans. 

We  can  reason  out  the  growth  of  a  belief ;  for  looked  at  over 
a  wide  area,  and  followed  through  a  sufficient  period  of  time, 
every  belief  has  a  kind  of  reason  and  a  kind  of  reality.  But 
to  each  individual  in  his  brief  span  of  life  it  is  like  the  wind, 
he  cannot  tell  whence  it  cometh,  or  whither  it  goeth.  To  the 
simple  northern  bonder  mending  his  plough  or  his  nets,  or 
sharpening  his  weapons,  the  sound  of  the  swans  far  overhead, 
chanting  their  lay  through  the  short  night,  was  in  reality  the 
sound  of  Odin's  maidens  singing  incantations,  hurrying  through 
the  air  to  some  battlefie'd,  to  take  part  in  the  slaughter,  or 
chuose  among  the  slain  denizens  for  Walhalla  (Valholl). 

They  were  proceeding  south  maybe,  forerunners,  we  have 
said,  of  the  human  flocks  from  the  same  Baltic  shores.  And, 
strange  to  say,  the  order  of  their  flight  was  in  nine  cases  out 
of  ten  one  which  was  rather  a  special  favourite  with  the 
Teuton  races,  the  form  of  a  wedge.  The  wedge  formation 
was  known  probably  to  all  the  Germans;1  nevertheless  the 
Goths  believed  that  it  has  been  specially  revealed  to  the 
ancestor  of  their  royal  line  the  Amalings.  The  formation  is 
called  in  Icelandic  literature  fylking  hamalf  as  having  been 
taught  by  Wodin  to  Hamal,  the  ancestor  of  the  Amalings. 3 
How  appropriate  if  this  wedge  formation  were  a  special  secret 
of  Wodin's,  that  the  swan-maidens  should  choose  that  for  their 
flight ;  or,  put  it  the  other  way,  and  say  how  uncanny  might  it 
seem  to  a  superstitious  Teuton  to  see  the  formation  of  his  own 
ranks  imitated  with  such  exactness  by  a  flying  troop  overhead  ! 

1  Cf.  Tacitus,  Germ.  6.  Acies  per  cuneos  composilus  ;  and  again  Hist. 
iv.   16,   Frisios,   Fatavos,  propriis  cuneis  comfonit  [Civilis]  . 

2  Fylkja  hamalt,  '  to  dress  a  battle  array  as  Hamal  taught.' 

3  Fylking,  it  is  worth  while  noticing,  translates  the  Latin  legio,  which,  in 
its  turn,  is  the  equivalent  of  the  cuneus  of  the  barbarians,  as  Tacitus 
uses  the  word.  However  in  this  sense  fylking  is  rather  to  be  translated 
'  array  of  battle.' 


"MYSTERIES"  AND  "MAGIC"  67 

In  the  Viking  Age  the  warlike  side  of  the  spae-wife's 
character  came  more  and  more  to  the  front.  All  the  heroines 
of  the  great  epic  cycle  in  the  north,  belong  to  the  race  of 
Valkyriur;  they  are  shield-maidens,  or  even  war-goddesses. 

*  Huggustu  Sigrun  !     Hildr  hefir  Jm  oss  vesit.' x 

We  know  how  often  hildr  (war)  was  the  termination  of  a  femi- 
nine name,  as  of  Brynhild,  Swanhild  (a  name  peculiarly  suit- 
able to  a  Valkyrja)  Grimhild,  Ragnhild,  and  many  more.2 

As  we  are  not  here  dealing  with  the  later  Norse,  but  the 
earlier  German  beliefs,  we  cannot  follow  this  elaborate  and 
beautiful  myth  of  the  Valkyriur  through  all  its  developments. 
That  must  be  left  to  its  proper  place  in  the  history  of  Heathen- 
dom. But  the  root  of  all  is  to  be  found  in  the  ancestral 
beliefs  of  the  Germans  touching  their  wise  women,  and  the 
god  from  whom  they  learned  their  wisdom. 

How  much  influence  these  primeval  beliefs  of  Germany 
touching  mysteries  and  magic  had  upon  the  mediaeval  beliefs 
upon  the  same  subjects,  it  would  be  no  easy  task  to  determine. 
When  we  are  speaking  of  a  heathen  creed  we  class  together 
the  two  sets  of  beliefs  implied  by  these  two  words,  '  mysteries ' 
and  '  magic  ' ;  they  are  not  identical,  but  they  are  nearly  allied. 
In  speaking  of  Christianity  in  any  shape  it  is  usual  to  separate 
them ;  to  speak  of  the  practices  authorized  by  the  Church  as 
mysteries,  of  those  not  authorized  as  magical.  In  both  de- 
partments, probably,  the  influence  of  the  Teutonic  creed  was 
great.  What  it  may  have  been  in  the  case  of  orthodox  belief 
we  may  measure  by  what  it  certainly  was  in  the  case  of  that 
which  was  unorthodox,  or  at  least  unauthorized — popular 
superstition. 

1  *  Comfort  thee,  Sigrun,  a  war-goddess  hast  thou  been  to  me.' 

2  Hildr  is  most  used  as  a  masculine  prefix  in  Old  Teutonic,  e.g.,  Hilde- 
brand  (Hildebraht),  and  z.femini?ie  stijfix  in  Old  Norse. 


68  CREED  OF  HEATHEN  GERMANY. 

For  the  reader,  I  will  presume,  has  already  detected  to  what 
offspring  gave  rise  in  the  Middle  Ages  the  Old  Teutonic  belief 
in  Wodin,  and  his  college  of  prophetesses.  We  have  only  to 
change  the  supreme  'wisdom'  of  ancient  days  to  the  'black 
art '  of  a  later  age,  the  god  of  heathendom  to  the  Satan  of 
Christendom,  and  the  shield-maidens  of  Wodin  to  the  Night 
Hags  who  rode  to  meet  Satan  on  the  Blocksberg,  and  the 
transformation,  natural  as  it  is,  is  complete.  Still  it  is  an 
apostolical  succession ;  there  is  no  important  link  lost  in  the 
long  sequence.  The  Brocken  takes  the  place,  say,  of  Wodin's 
grove  in  Central  Germany,  of  Nerthus's  island,  or  the  grove 
where  Charlemagne  found  the  Irminsul  of  the  Angrarii,  as  the 
metropolitan  seat  or  see  of  this  transformed  worship.  But,  as  in 
the  earlier  examples,  the  Brocken  was  only  the  chief  out  of 
many  similar  holy  (or  unholy)  sites.  The  legend  of  the  Witches 
Sabbath  was  everywhere  the  most  deep-seated  of  all  the  super- 
stitions of  Mediaeval  Europe. 

VI. 

The  sight  of  what  must  have  been  one  of  the  deepest  laid 
beliefs  of  German  Heathendom  developing  into  one  of  the 
most  steadfast  superstitions  of  Mediaeval  Catholicism  must  make 
us  ask,  how  far  that  body  of  belief,  which  was  during  the  latter 
age  the  most  absorbing  of  all,  may  have  been  affected  by  the 
creed  of  heathen  Germany.  I  mean  the  belief  touching  the 
other  world. 

There  is  a  certain  illogical  logic  about  all  mythologies. 
Where  philosophy  leaps  at  once  to  abstract  terms  and  speaks 
of  an  omniscient,  omnipotent,  omnipresent  deity — mythology 
aiming  at  the  same  notions,  proceeds,  agreeably  to  its  nature,  by 
positive  imagery,  in  place  of  negative  abs  traction.  The  supreme 
god  of  the  Teutons  is  not  omniscient  nor  omnipotent ;  but  he 
is,  as  we  have  seen,  pre-eminent  in  magic,  in  that  great  region 


THE  CITY  OF  THE  GODS.  69 

of  the  might- be  in  which  you  can  set  no  bound  to  possibilities. 
What  Odin  learned  at  Mimir's  Well ;  what  hidden  potencies 
had  the  charms  he  there  acquired — Who  can  put  a  limit  to 
these  ? 

So  it  stands  again  with  the  notion  of  omnipresence.  That 
abstraction  is  best  expressed  to  thought  by  a  negative—  no 
place  without  the  deity.  Positive  mythology,  in  the  case  of 
Wodin  or  Thor,  stopped  a  long  way  short  of  that.  But  it  went 
on  multiplying  the  places  in  which  the  great  god  might  be 
sought  and  found.  The  deity  dwelt  most  of  all,  say,  in  that 
sacred  grove  of  the  Sem nones,  whereof  we  have  so  often 
spoken.  But  he  was  present,  after  a  kind,  in  every  other  sacred 
grove,  he  was  secretum  Mud  of  each  village's  holy  place.  Just 
so  to  the  Catholic,  Christ  is  in  heaven,  but  He  likewise — and 
in  this  case  not  the  spirit  only,  but  the  body  as  well — is  present 
on  every  altar. 

In  addition  to  the  holy  grove  of  the  village,  of  the  Gau, 
or  of  the  whole  nation  or  group  of  nations,  we  may  feel  sure 
that  the  ancient  Germans  had  likewise  the  notion  of  another 
home  of  the  gods,  a  holy  city  in  the  clouds  or  on  the 
borders  of  earth.  Among  the  Scandinavians  this  Teutonic 
Olympus  is  the  Asa-burg,  Asa-gard,  a  heavenly  place  invisible 
to  mortal  sight,  or,  shall  we  say,  visible  from  time  to  time 
between  the  clouds  of  sunset.  From  the  ^Esir's  burg  the  rainbow 
— the  gods'  bridge  x — made  a  way  leading  to  earth,  or  possibly 
to  a  place  below  the  earth.  I  have  little  doubt  that  the  Galaxy 
was  thought  to  be  a  bridge  of  the  same  kind.  The  Galaxy 
was  the  divine  counterpart  of  some  of  the  greatest  of  the 
Roman  roads  on  earth,  which  roads  were  themselves  esteemed 
by  the  Teutons  who  knew  them   and  knew  not  their  origin, 

1  Asbrd  in  the  Eddas,  or  Bilrost,  Bifrbst. 


70  CREED  OF  HEATHEN  GERMANY, 

things  half  divine.  Thus  the  Roman  name  for  these  roads, 
strata,  was  transferred  to  the  galaxy,  which  was  known  as 
Watling  Street,  Inning  Street,  Iring  Street.1 

The  spot  at  which  this  heavenly  bridge  touched  the  earth — 
generally,  so  far  as  can  be  gathered,  thought  of  as  either  in  the 
north  or  west — was  a  stead  ox  holy  place.  Thither,  according  to 
the  Eddas,  the  gods  used  to  ride  each  day  over  Asbru  to  hold 
council ;  much  as  the  elders  of  the  village  or  state  might  retire 
to  the  glades  of  the  forest,  their  own  thing-stead.  According 
to  some  accounts,  in  the  midst  of  this  divine  thing-stead,  stojd 
the  fountain  of  Weird,2  that  is,  of  Death.  Wherefore  in  one 
aspect  of  it  the  divine  thing-stead  is  seen  to  lie  in  the  '  other ' 
world.  No  mythologies,  however,  make  very  clear  distinctions 
between  the  borders  of  the  actual  world  and  what  we  call  the 
'  other '  world.  This  *  holy  place  '  of  the  gods  must  likewise 
be  the  same  place  which  many  of  the  northern  traditions  speak 
of  as  Oddinsakr,  the  Acre,  the  Field,  of  the  Immortals,  the 
Elysian  Fields  of  the  North.  It  is  also  known  as  the  Glittering 
Fields.3 

This  myth  is  not  Scandinavian  simply,  not  even  Teutonic, 
alone,  but  may  be  a  universal  Aryan  one.  For  this  glittering 
bright  immortal  region  is  none  other  than  the  '  Land  beyond 
the  North  Wind,'  the  land  of  the  Hyperboreans  of  which 
Homer  knew.  We  might,  however,  take  a  different  view  of  the 
connection,  and  suppose  that  the  myth  of  the  Hyperboreans 
itself  was  imported  by  the  Greeks  from  some  northern  source ; 
in  the  same  way  that  it  has  been  thought  they  imported  the 
myth  of  the  Phaeacians,  the  ferriers  of  the  dead,  from  the  region 
whence  Procopius  in  a  much  later  age  got  his  myth  of  Brittia. 


1  Cf.  Widukind,  i.   13  (P.  iii.  424),  and  Grimm,  Deutsche  Mythologie 
p.  235  (tr.  Stalybrass).  2   Ur&ir-brunnr,  Edda. 

3  Ghesisvellir.     This  name  answers,  more  or  less,  to  the  glass  mountain 
of  our  fairy  tales.      It  was  a  Celtic  belief  also.     See  Grimm,  D.  M. 


THE  HOME  OF  THE  SUN.  71 

And  as  we  have  been  again  brought  face  to  face  with  Procopius' 
story,  I  cannot  omit  to  point  out  that  many  of  the  accoun's  of 
Oddinsakr  and  the  Glittering  Land  show  us  some  portion 
thereof  fenced  off  by  a  wall  in  such  a  way  that  the  region 
beyond  the  wall  is  of  a  wholly  different  character  from  that  on 
this  side;  so  that  the  mortal  who  visits  this  land  of  the  Im- 
mortals and  comes  back  to  tell  the  tale  has  yet  never  been 
allowed  to  pass  beyond  the  wall.  I  think  it  is  quite  possible 
that  this  feature  has  been  imported  from  the  land  extremum 
pandit  qua  Gallia  littus,  and  from  the  '  Brittia '  myth.  It  would 
be  quite  natural  for  such  a  legend  to  pass  from  Gauls  to  Ger- 
mans ;  and  if  that  has  been  the  case  here,  this  myth  of  the 
Hyperborean  Paradise  must  be  as  distinctly  German  as  Scan- 
dinavian. 

Or  say  especially  a  possession  of  the  Germans  of  North 
Germany.  I  do  not  think  there  is  anything  strange  in  men 
fixing  upon  the  North,  though  it  is  the  home  of  frost  and  snow, 
for  the  site  of  this  Earthly  Paradise.  Nobody  can  think  this 
strange  who  remembers  what  the  northern  summer  is  like;  who* 
has  seen  the  red  sunset  glow  brooding  in  the  north  till  it  is 
subdued  by  the  silvery  approach  of  dawn,  has  seen  the 
twilight  linger  in  these  lands  all  night,  strong  enough,  as 
Tacitus  wrote,  to  dim  the  light.of  the  stars. 

In  the  north,  as  Tacitus  likewise  says,  was  thought  to  lie  the 
home  of  the  sun.  Sun  (Sol,  Sonne)  is  in  the  German  languages 
a  woman.  In  the  Scandinavian  mythology  Sol  flees  all  day  be- 
fore the  sun-devouring  wolf  (Eclipse).  She  is  only  safe  when  she 
reaches  the  wood  of  the  Varns,  at  the  beginning  of  the  under- 
world. There  Billing  and  the  other  elves  of  the  sunset  meet  her 
with  kindled  torches,  which  throw  their  reflection  upon  the  sky. 
Billing  is  the  watchman  of  the  western  edge  of  the  Odainsakr, 
and  Delling,  the  Elf  of  Dawn,  of  the  eastern  edge,  and  we 
may   consider   this   Paradise   in   the   North    either   as   on   the 


72  CREED  OF  HE  A 1  HEN  GERMANY. 

outward  rim  of  this  world  or  the  entrance  of  anothei.     Such 
is  the  summer  picture  of  the  Other  World. 

But  change  the  scene  from  summer  to  winter,  and  we  have  a 
still  more  impressive  image.  Now  the  Other  World  is  the  land 
of  Giants ;  and  this  is  the  picture  which  is  the  most  consistent 
with  the  whole  cosmology  of  the  Eddas,  and,  on  that  account 
we  may  believe,  even  more  deeply  rooted  in  the  consciousness 
of  the  German  people  than  the  conception  of  the  Earthly  Para- 
dise. With  this  cold  region,  Jotunheimar,  are  naturally  far  more 
nearly  associated  all  ideas  of  Death,  such  as  of  Weird  and  her 
fountain,  than  with  the  summer  land  above  spoken  of.  All 
that  is  strange  and  fearful,  all  images  of  pain  and  horror,  will 
always  be  gathered  together  and  poured  into  the  mould  of  that 
one  awful  conception — Death.  What  gives  its  character  to  the 
mythology  of  the  north— of  all  the  Baltic  regions — is  that 
nature  supplies  the  substance  of  these  pictures  in  such  large 
measure.  * 

In  the  Norse  mythology  the  habitable  world  (Mannheimar, 
man's  home)  is  conceived  as  an  island,  containing,  no  doubt, 
its  proper  complement  of  inland  seas,  with  their  viks  and 
islands,  of  which  the  safe,  familiar  Baltic  made  one.  But 
outside  of  all  flowed  that  sea  which  Tacitus  heard  of,  the  sea, 
thick  and  almost  stagnant,  'which  we  may  believe  girdles  the 
whole  earth.'  This  sea  is  in  Norse  mythology  called  the  Sea  of  the 
Elivagar,  the  venom-cold  waves.1  It  is  like  QKedvog,  'a  shadowy 
sea,  a  sea  calamitous.'  'Bold  must  he  be,'  says  the  Edda, 
'  who  strives  to  pass  those  waters.'  Somewhere,  far  in  the 
North,  this  ocean  contains  a  maelstrom,  whereby  boats  may  be 

1  We  may  remember  in  reading  the  account  of  the  Elivagar,  Pytheas' 
description  of  the  sea  beyond  Thule,  and  the  shapes  (ice-floes?)  to  be  seen 
therein.  The  elivagar  are  said  to  lie  'at  the  end  of  heaven'  (on  the 
horizon),     llymisk.  1.  17  (C.  P.B.). 


JOTUNHEIMAR.  73 

sucked  down  under  the  waves  and  landed  in  some  out-world 
or  under-world  region.  This  maelstrom,  too  (it  is  the  mael- 
strom of  the  Luftbdens,  no  doubt,  only  exaggerated  by  the  lens 
of  mythology),  is  conceived  as  a  sort  of  primeval  fount  whirling 
up  'at  once  and  ever'  the  source  of  all  seas  which  fill  the 
world.  Somewhere  down  beneath  it  is  an  immense  world-mill 
revolving  round  and  round,  and  churning  up  this  primeval 
fount,  called  Hvergelmir,  while  its  handle  moves  the  disk  of 
the  heaven  and  the  stars  which  turn  therewith.1 

Beyond  the  sea  of  the  Elivagar  lies  Jotunheimar.  And 
when  we  have  got  there  we  have  got  not  only  to  the  borders  of 
the  earth,  but  to  (or  beyond)  the  borders  of  Helheimar,  the 
abode  of  ghosts.  And  what  shows  that  Jotunheim  extended 
into  Helheim  is  that  the  giants  (/dinar)  and  monsters  {thursar) 
who  inhabit  Jotunheim  seem  to  divide  themselves  into  two 
classes — one,  of  which  the  names  show  them  to  be  personifica- 
tions of  natural  forces,  the  other  whose  names  show  them 
personifications  of  Death. 

There  is  a  passage  in  the  Edda  poetry  where  a  certain  King 
Heidrek  is  represented  asking  riddles  of  a  wise  man — Odin,  or 
some  other.     One  of  the  riddles  is  : 

'  Who  is  the  Huge  One  who  walks  over  the  sea  and  land 
devouring  the  hills  ;  who  fears  the  Wind  but  no  man,  and 
makes  war  upon  the  Sun  ? ' 

The  answer  to  the  riddle  is  '  Fog.'  The  sentence,  however, 
might  stand  for  an  exact  description  of  the  typical  nature-giant 
in  the  Edda.  These  giants,  one  and  all,  make  war  successfully 
upon  the  sun  in  the  person  of  Baldr ;  they  fear  no  man,  but 
they  fear  the  Wind,  who  is  Odin,  and  still  more  the  Thunder, 

1  I  do  not  suppose  that  Hvergelmir  was  originally  anything  different 
from  Urd's  well.  And  I  doubt  if  the  slaves  of  the  world-mill  were  originally 
different  from  the  Norns  who  guarded  Urd's  well.  Rydberg  distinguishes 
three  different  founts  in  the  lower- world. 


74  CREED  OF  HEATHEN  GERMANY. 

Thor.  They  are,  in  fact,  the  impersonations  of  the  frost  and 
the  rime;  and  the  rime  is  the  mist  or  fog  of  frost.  Their 
names  show  how  completely  they  are  the  embodiments  of 
nature.  Collectively  they  are  Hrimthursar,  Rime-Giants.  In- 
dividually they  are  called  Hrim,  Hrimgrim,  and  so  forth. 
Fantastic  as  they  are  to  us,  they  were  very  real  to  our  far 
ancestors.  The  being  who  stalked  at  night  under  the  misty 
hills  and  feared  the  Wind,  had  in  the  morning  left  behind  him 
the  token  of  his  presence  in  the  rime  on  blade  and  bough. 
fa  met  pcem  mycel  mist  on  se  says  even  our  English  Chronicle, 
describing  a  Viking  expedition.  Not  'they  met,'  but  '  therr 
met  them,'  a  great  Fog  on  sea.  Naturally  these  beings  of  the 
frost  and  fog  belong  more  to  the  Northern  mythology  than 
elsewhere  \  but  they  were — the  whole  giant  race  was — a  com- 
mon heirloom  of  Teutonic  belief. 

One  fact  alone  shall  suffice  us  as  evidence  both  that  the  giant- 
race  was  as  much  a  part  of  German  mythology  as  of  Scandi- 
navian, and  that  it  excited  a  very  real  terror  in  the  popular 
mind.  It  is  this :  that  the  Huns  (Magyars),  who  during  the 
tenth  century  swept  over  Germany  and  gave  that  country  the 
most  terrible  experience  of  barbarian  invasion  which  since  she 
became  a  portion  of  Christendom  she  had  ever  known  or  was 
to  know,  have  usurped  in  popular  mythology  the  place  of  the 
ancient  Eotan  race.  Usurped  it  very  unfittingly  no  doubt  in 
fact,  whereby  the  huge  bones  of  fossil  animals  are  ascribed  in 
folk-lore  to  the  small,  swarthy  Turcoman  horsemen;  but  very 
appropriately  to  the  lessons  of  mythology,  if  we  remember 
what  a  devastating  horde  they  were,  deserving  to  be  called  the 
children  of  witches  and  were-wolves,  like  their  predecessors, 
Jordanes'  Huns,  the  exact  antithesis  of  all  the  children  ot 
light. 

After  the  frost  and  snow  giants  we  come  to  those  who  repre- 
sent not  physical   cold,  but  the  cold  and    numbness    of  the 


THE  JOTNAR.  75 

tomb ;  or  to  others  who,  to  use  Elia's  words,  speak  not  of  a 
'  privation  '  only,  but  a  '  more  awful  and  confounding  positive.' 
We  have  already  spoken  of  one  giant  called  Hraesvelg,  corpse- 
devourer.  He  si  is  by  the  corpse  (ndr-)  gates  on  coipse-strand 
(fi dr- strand).  Many  of  those  who,  in  the  (late)  Eddaic  myth- 
ology, appear  as  giants,  having  no  special  character  (or  even  as 
o.dinary  mortals),  prove,  when  we  can  hunt  up  some  earlier 
myth  about  them,  to  be  chthonic  beings.  We  have  already 
mentioned  one  instance  in  point — GeirrotS  in  the  Edda,  who 
is  Geruthus,  a  king  of  the  under-world,  in  Saxo.  Utgarfrloki 
who,  in  the  Gylfaginning,1  is  simply  the  owner  of  a  giant  city  in 
Jotunheim,  appears  in  Saxo  as  Utgarthilocus,  a  king  of  the 
dead.  It  is  evident  that  many  parts  of  the  Eddaic  mythology 
instead  of  being  newly  invented  have  decayed  from  their 
primitive  condition. 

Scrutinized  in  this  manner  the  northern  mythology  soon 
shows  us  how  large  a  horizon  was  occupied  in  popular  belief 
by  the  other  world  and  its  inhabitants.  We  find  for,  example, 
that  almost  all  the  chief  gods,  and  most  of  the  chief  Eddaic 
heroes,  made  at  one  time  of  their  lives  a  descent  to  the 
under-world.  Balder,  the  sun  god,  went  down,  alas  !  never  to 
return.  Frey,  his  counterpart,  went  down  in  the  person  of  his 
messenger,  and  other  self,  Skirnir  (the  Shiner).2  He,  indeed, 
came  back ;  but  he  left  below  the  most  precious  of  his  posses- 
sions, his  sword ;  and  the  loss  of  that  wras  one  day  to  prove  his 
own  destruction.  Thorr  went  to  hell,  when  he  journeyed  to  the 
city  of  UtgarSloki.  Odin  descended  thither  after  he  had 
hung  nine  days  on  the  gallows-tree ;  in  another  myth,  he 
descended  in  the  person  of  his  messenger,  and  his  other  self, 
HermoSr  (War-fury). 3      Surely   in   no  other    myth-system    do 

1  The  first  portion  of  the  Edda  Snorra  or  Younger  Edda. 

2  Clearly  only  a  by-name  of  Frey. 

3  In  the  VegtamskviSa,  Odin  in  person  rides  to  hell. 


76  CREED  OF  HEATHEN  GERMANY. 

the  gods  stand  in  such  close  relation  to  the  kingdom  of 
death. 

Nor  is  this  ambition  of  visiting  the  world  of  shades  confined 
to  the  gods.  It  is  shared  by  those  half-divine  heroes  whose 
le  .ends  form  an  integral  portion  of  the  corpus  of  northern  myth- 
ology. Sigurd  (Sigrod),  when  he  awoke  Brynhild-Si=rdrifa  out 
of  her  death-sleep,  or  urged  his  horse,  Grani,  through  the 
flames  which  surrounded  her  hall,  was  in  redity  performing 
an  Orphean  task — he  was  visiting  his  beloved  in  the  under- 
world. Another  poem  gives  a  description  of  Brynhild's  ride 
down  to  hell ;  though  this  is  a  late  and  rather  dubious 
authority.  There  are  other  heroes,  such  as  Helgi,  who,  having 
been  dead,  are  summoned  from  their  'how,'  or  funeral  mound, 
by  the  incantation s  of  the  spse-woman — the  Valkyria — whom 
they  had  had  to  wife. 

This  instance  brings  us  to  another  aspect  of  the  rela- 
tions between  Mannlieim  and  Helheim — the  power  of  necro- 
mancy, of  conjuring  the  dead  to  come  out  of  their  tombs. 
Such  powers  belong,  it  need  not  be  said,  to  all  systems  of 
magic ;  and  I  do  not  know  that  the  employment  of  them  was 
a  specially  common  feature  in  the  northern  magic.  Still  there 
are  many  instances  of  such  employment,  and  in  combination 
with  the  myths  of  Jotunheimar  and  Helheimar,  they  help  us  to 
form  a  picture  of  the  popular  beliefs  concerning  the  other 
world. 

Out  of  all  these  sources  it  would  be  possible  to  draw  a 
picture  tolerably  consistent  with  itself  of  the  underground 
homes  of  the  dead,  of  places  of  punishment  and  of  happiness, 
of  the  homes  of  the  primitive  earth-powers,  the  bei  gs  who 
attend  to  the  growth  of  nature  and  the  nourishment  of  the 
world-tree,  of  the  beings  of  decay  and  death,  of  frost  and  cold.1 

1  Rydberg  has  undertaken  the  task  of  drawing  such  a  complete  picture, 
and  accomplish  xl  v  on  the  whole  with  striking  success  ;  so  at  least  it  seems 


THE  HOME  OF  THE  DEAD.  y7 

But  any  such  detailed  account  would  be  not  only  far  beyond 
the  compass  of  this  chapter,  it  would  be  very  inappropriate  to  a 
description  of  the  ancestral  beliefs  of  the  Teutonic  races.  Such 
a  picture  as  that  must  partake  of  all  the  elements  out  of  which 
the  Eddaic  mytl  ology  is  made  up.  It  must  contain  many 
things  borrowed  from  Christian  eschatology,  many  more  which, 
though  they  existed  before  the  contact  with  Christendom,  have 
been  unduly  emphasized  owing  to  that  contact;  while  in  aiming 
at  a  picture  of  primitive  belief  we  must  content  ourselves  with 
notions  very  ill-defined,  with  what  could  by  no  means  be  always 
moulded  into  a  consistent  whole,  in  a  word  with  images  which 
impressed  the  popular  imagination,  which  it  could  not  rid  itself 
of,  but  which  it  was  generally  unwilling  to  dwell  upon  at 
length,  and  never  thought  of  shaping  into  a  single  system. 
This  popular  and  persistent  imagery  of  the  other  world  will  be 
that  which  alone  has  the  power  of  securing  for  itself  a  lasting 
place  in  the  popular  mythology. 

Not  the  least  impressive  among  the  images  which  answer  to 
this  test  is  that  of  the  wall  of  flame,  which  constantly  appears 
surrounding  the  House  of  Death.  Now  it  appears  as  a  ring  of 
fire  which  encircles  the  whole  of  Jdtunhei?nar,  now  it  encloses 
some  particular  house  within  those  precincts ;  that  house  or 

to  me.  See  Teutonic  Mythology,  pp.  209-494.  This  is  the  most  impor- 
tant portion  of  Mr.  Victor  Kydberg's  work  \Undersokningar  i  Germanisk 
Mythologi).  It  is  to  be  regretted  that  this  author  should  mar  the  effect  of 
great  research  and  great  acumen,  by  the  occasional  display  of  what  might 
almost  appear  a  disingenuous  ingenuity.  As,  for  example,  when  he  selects 
four  lines  out  of  a  series  in   Havamal — 

Veiztu  hve  bioja  skal,  veiztu  hve  biota  skal  ? 
Betra  es  obef5it  an  se  of  blotiff,  &c. 

— as  evidence  of  a  ritualist  war  between  the  ^Esir- worshippers  and  the  Vanir- 
worshippers.  Or  when  he  makes  a  verse  out  of  the  same  poem  (43),  whose 
meaning  is  perfectly  simple  and  clear,  carry  a  forced  reference  to  the 
making  of  man  and  woman  out  of  Ask  and  Etnbla. 


7%  CREED  OF  HE  A  THEN  GERMANY. 

castle  being  for  the  moment  the  representative  of  the  whole 
region,  being  in  fact  the  House  of  Death. 

In  the  simplest  of  sun-myths  to  be  found  in  the  Edda,  that  which 
tells  the  story  of  Frey's  descent  to  Jotunheim  in  the  person  of 
Swipdag,  Day  swoop,  Daybreak,  we  have  a  characteristic  and 
impressive  picture  of  this  fiery  wall.  Daybreak  *  says,  as  he 
approaches  the  giant  warder  of  the  courts  of  Menglod  : — 

What  monster  is  it  before  the  forecourt  standing, 
And  hovering  round  the  burning  flame. 

And  later  on,  when  he  asks  the  guardian  the  name  of  the 
hall,  he  says  : — 

How  name  they  this  hall  that  is  girt  round 
With  a  certain  flickering  flame.2 

And  in  like  manner  Frey's  messenger,  Skirnir,  before  setting 
out  to  Jotunheim,  says  to  his  master : — 

Give  me  thy  steed,  then,  that  he  may  bear  me  through 
The  mirk  flickering  flame. 

In  truth  this  expression,  '  flickering  flame '  (vafrlogi),  turns 
out  to  be  applied  especially  to  the  flame  which  surrounds  the 
other  world. 

Among  a  people  by  whom  the  pyre  was  the  recognized 
means  of  departure  from  this  world  to  the  next  3  the  funeral 


1  Swipdag  is  really  rather  a  god  of  spring  than  of  daybreak.  '  Windcold,' 
he  says,  '  is  my  name.     My  father  was  Springcold,  his  father  Hardcold.' 

2  Corp.  Poet.  Bor.y  '  Swipday  and  Menglad,'  vv.  IJ  and  47  (  =  Fjols- 
vinnsm.,  I  and  31). 

3  For  a  piece  of  evidence  on  the  importance  which  at  one  time  the 
northern  nations  attached  to  cremation,  compare  an  interesting  passage  in 
Ibn  Haukal's  Kitdb  el-Meshdlik  zva-l-Memdlik  (Travels  in  Russia). 


THE  VAFRLOGI.  79 

(lame  would  naturally  (nay,  inevitably)  be  translated  into  the 
image  of  an  actual  wall  of  fire  surrounding  the  Halls  of  Death. 
But  then  this  mythic  image  might  very  well  be  enforced  by  a 
natural  one. 

Let  us  remember  that  Jotunheim,  beside  being  the  forecourt  of 
the  other  world,  is  likewise  an  embodiment  of  winter,  the  winter 
aspect  of  the  north,  just  as  the  Earthly  Paradise,  the  Odainsakr, 
is  its  summer  aspect.  As  over  one  the  light  of  the  sunset 
lingered  long  enough  to  dim  the  light  of  the  stars,  or,  if  you 
will,  as  the  torches  of  Billing  and  Delling,  the  elves  of  twilight 
and  the  dawn,  sent  up  their  reflection  upon  the  sky  all  through 
the  night,  so  in  winter  another  light  may  be  seen  to  surround 
the  northern  sky,  a  light  to  which  the  expressions  '  flickering 
flame,'  and  'mirk  flickering  flame'  are  peculiarly  appropriate, 
the  Aurora  Borealis,  the  '  dawn  of  the  north.'  * 

This,  I  think,  completes  the  tale  of  the  physical  pheno- 
mena, out  of  which  the  northern  people  composed  their  mythic 
world  of  death.  The  unknown  northern  seas  with  their  ice- 
Hoes,  the  ElivogS)  and  their  maelstrom  (Hvergelmir) ;  the  lands 
of  perpetual  ice  and  snow  far  in  the  north;  the  Aurora Borealis 
shining  over  all  with  its  pale  or  ruddy  wavering  gleam.  And  if 
it  be  said  that  the  materials  for  this  picture  could  not  have 
belonged  in  equal  measure  to  the  Germans  of  Germany  I  will 
grant  it :  not  in  equal  measure,  but  in  no  small  measure.  For 
the  Aurora  Borealis  is  certainly  often  seen  in  Northern 
Germay  ;  and  Northern  Germany  has  its  full  share  of  frost  and 
fog  and  snow.  Besides  which  it  may  be  that  the  nations  of 
Northern  Germany  had  really  come  out  of  the  north,  and  it 
certainly   was  the  case  that   they  had  much   closer  relations 


1  In  modern  Icelandic  vafrlogi  is  used  for  the  ignis  fatuus  (see  Vigfusson 
Diet.  s.  v.).  And  this  modern  use  certainly  points  much  more  to  the 
Aurora  Borealis  than  to  the  lightning,  which  is  what  Rydberg  interprets  the 
vafrloei  to  be. 


80  CREED  OF  HEATHEN  GERM  AX  Y. 

therewith  in  prehistoric  days  than  afterwards,1  and  believed 
themselves  to  have  sprung  thence. 

It  now  remains  to  select  from  the  Edda  poems  some 
passages  which  may  present  in  a  vivid  shape  the  picture  of  the 
Death  Kingdom,  as  I  have  tried  to  draw  it. 

We  have  said  that  the  Vafrlogi  is  not  a  physical  phenomenon 
only;  that  it  belongs,  so  to  say,  to  the  dead,  to  the  tomb.  We 
need  not,  therefore,  be  surprised  to  meet  it  even  when  we  are 
only  concerned  with  the  summoning  of  a  dead  man  out  of  his 
1  how,'  not  with  a  journey  from  this  world  into  the  next.  We  find 
it,  for  example,  in  the  summoning  of  Agantyr  by  his  daughter 
Hervor.  Nothing  in  literature  is  more  weird  and  impressive 
than  the  picture  of  the  fire  breaking  out  on  every  side  (a 
mystic,  not  a  consuming  fire)  while  the  incantations  are  being 
chanted  and  the  dead  comes  to  life — 

Fires  are  flickering,  graves  are  gaping  j 

Burn  fold  and  fen. 
Be  not  we  affrighted  at  such  moanings, 

Though  on  all  sides  the  island  burns. 
Ajar  lies  hell-gate,  the  ;  how  '  is  opened, 
Fire  I  behold  all  round  the  island. 

Then  follows  an  awful  conjuration  of  the  dead,  and  Agantyr 
speaks  from  his  tomb. 

Not  less  impressive  is  the  story  of  Helgi  and  Sigrun,  wherein 
the  dead  warrior  rides  forth  from  his  tomb  to  meet  his  wife. 
But  we  do  not  get  here  any  precisely  new  image  connected 
with  death. 

These  accounts  lead  us  on  to  other  myths  in  which  one  who 
is  dead  is  awakened  by  a  visit  paid  not  to  the  tomb  on  earth,  but 

1  See  in  this  connection  a  very  striking  note  on  two  runes  of  the  Tune- 
stone  inscription  in  Corp.  Poet.  Bor.,  i.  572.  I  do  not  pretend,  of  course, 
to  declare  how  far  Vigfusson's  reading,  which  differs  from  the  readings  of 
Wimmer  and  Bugge,  is  supported  by  the  facts. 


DESCENT  TO  HELL.  81 

to  the  House  of  the  Dead  below  the  earth.  In  the  story  of 
Sigrdrifa  and  Sigurd  the  act  is  told  metaphorically.  Sigrdrifa, 
who  has  offended  Odin,  has  been  pricked  by  a  sleep-thorn. 
That  really  means  that  she  is  dead.  Sigurd  has  to  rescue 
her  out  of  a  hall  roind  which  burns  a  wall  of  flame.  He  had 
already  heard  birds  prophesying  this  deed.     One  said  : — 

A  hall  is  on  high  Hindarfjall ; 

With  fire  without  'tis  all  surrounded. 

Mighty  lords  that  palace  builded 

Of  undimmed  earth-flame.1 

I  know  that  on  the  fell  a  war  maiden  sleeps, 

Around  her  flickers  the  linden's  bane,2 

With  his  sleep-thorn  Odin  has  pierced  the  maiden, 

Who  the  God's  chosen  dared  in  battle  to  bring  low. 

Then  there  ate  other  accounts  which  give  us  the  actual 
journey  to  the  under-world.  This  is  a  region  so  closely 
associated  with  thoughts  of  mist  and  darkness  that  even  the 
time  for  making  the  journey  is  generally  night  (as  people 
generally  die  in  the  night).  Skirnir,  for  example,  after  he  has 
(in  the  passage  quoted  above)  begged  of  Frey  his  horse, 
addresses  that  horse  in  the  following  words  : — 

Dark  it  grows  without,  time  it  is  to  fare, 

Over  the  misty  fells, 

Over  thursar-land. 
We  will  both  return,  or  that  all-powerful  jotun 

Shall  seize  us  both. 

And  then  we  follow  the  details  of  the  journey  a  little  further. 
Generally  the  traveller  has  to  pass  along  a  continually  darking 
road  which  for  days — nine  days — leads  onward  to  the  lower- 
world.  Fearful  monsters  try  and  affright  him,  hell-hounds, 
guardians  of  that  land.  When  he  has  reached  the  entrance  to 
the  city  of  Hel  he  finds  at  the  gate  a  Volva's  grave.  Such  is 
the  picture  given  of  Odin's  hell-journey  in  the  Vegtamskvida. 

1  Gold.  2  Fire. 


82  CREED  OF  HEATHEN  GERMANY. 

Downward  he  rode  toward  Niflhel, 

Then  met  him  the  hell-hound  from  its  cave  coming, 

Bloody  it  was  upon  its  breast, 

And  it  bayed  and  gaped  wide 

At  the  sire  of  runic  songs. 

Onward  rode  Odin,  the  earth  echoed, 
Till  to  the  high  Hel's  house  he  came  ; 
Then  rode  the  god  to  the  eastern  gate, 
Where  he  knew  there  was  a  Volva's  grave ; 
To  the  wise  one  began  he  his  charms  to  chant, 
Till  she  uprose  a-force  and  the  dead  one  spake — 

'Say  what  man  and  men  to  me  unknown, 
Trouble  has  made  for  me  and  my  rest  destroyed  ; 
Snow  has  snowed  o'er  me  ;  rain  has  rained  upon  me  ; 
Dew  has  bedewed  me,  I  have  long  been  dead.' 


CHAPTER  III. 
CHRISTENDOM, 

I. 

We  have  not  in  the  case  of  Christendom  a  task  before  us  like 
that  with  which  we  were  confronted  in  the  last  chapter — the 
task  of  determining  a  creed's  foundation  and  its  earliest  form. 
The  materials  for  doing  this  for  Christianity  are  in  the  hands 
of  every  one ;  and  though  it  cannot  be  said  that  every  one  is 
agreed  as  to  the  conclusions  to  be  drawn  therefrom,  the  dis- 
cussion of  such  controversial  questions  lies,  fortunately,  quite 
outside  the  sphere  of  our  present  study. 

Unless,  indeed,  it  be  reckoned  a  point  of  controversy  to 
maintain  that  Christianity  has  never  changed  since  its  first 
foundation.  That  is  a  problem  which,  speaking  from  an 
historical  standpoint,  it  would  be  impossible  to  admit.  We 
have  not  to  say  whether  the  germs  of  the  later  creeds  do  or  do 
not  lie  in  the  most  primitive  Christianity.  Whether,  for 
example,  the  text  '  This  is  my  blood  which  is  shed  for  many 
for  the  remission  of  sins '  would  or  would  not  legitimately 
develop  into  the  elaborate  and  mystical  (or  magical)  rites  and 
beliefs  of  mediaeval  Catholicism  ;  whether  the  text  '  There  is 
no  man  that  hath  left  house,  or  parents,  or  brethren,  or  wife 
and  children  for  the  kingdom  of  God's  sake,  who  shall  not 


S4  CHRISTENDOM. 

receive  manifold  more  in  this  present  time  and  in  the  world  to 
come  life  everlasting,'  was  designed  to  foster  the  practice  of 
monachism;  or  even  whether  the  words  'I  am  not  come  to 
-end  peace  into  the  world  but  a  sword,'  do  or  do  not  present 
i  quasi- sanction  tor  religious  wars  and  religious  persecutions. 
These  are  not  matters  on  which  we  have  to  speak. 

But  we  have  to  reckon  with  the  fact  that  there  are  three 
elements  in  the  later  Catholicism  pointed  at  in  the  last  sentence, 
viz.,  the  growth  of  dogma  leading  to  persecution,  the  growth 
of  monasticism,  and  the  growth  of  the  sacramental  doctrine, 
which  can  be  as  legitimately  made  the  subjects  of  historical 
inquiry  as  can  any  other  human  developments  about  which  there 
exists  no  special  theory  of  prescription.  To  the  historian 
studying  the  history  of  these  growths  of  belief,  it  is  a  matter  of 
very  secondary  importance  whether  a  sanction  for  them  can  be 
found  in  the  writings  of  this  or  that  father,  in  the  decrees  of 
this  or  that  council  of  the  Church.  He  recognizes— that  is  to 
say,  if  he  is  at  all  fitted  to  be  the  historian  of  ideas — that 
Belief,  like  all  things  spiritual,  is  not  to  be  expressed  in  set 
formulas  nor  sealed  up  in  the  tightest  of  decrees  or  articles  ; 
that  it  is  little  aftected  by  the  form  of  words  to  which  a  par- 
ticular body  of  individuals  may  consent  to  append  their 
signatures;  that  the  belief  of  any  age  is  nothing  more  than  the 
sum  of  the  individual  opinions  of  that  age,  with  only  this 
proviso — that  the  opinion  in  every  case  is  one  on  which  its 
possessor  is  prepared  to  act.  And  therefore  for  a  history  of 
Christian  or  of  any  other  belief  he  seeks  for  a  hundred  indica- 
tions, in  popular  art,  popular  legend,  familiar  literature  and 
correspondence,  at  least  as  important  for  his  study  as  legal 
formulae  or  the  decrees  of  councils. 

In  three  directions,  it  has  been  already  said  (and,  indeed,  the 
fact  is  generally  recognized),  does  the  development  of  mediaeval 
Catholicism  chiefly  display  itself ;  towards  dogma  and  persecu- 


THE  DON  ATI  ST  QUARREL.  85 

tion;  towards  monasticism  ;  towards  mysteries  and  orders. 
Using  another  image,  we  might  call  these  the  three  pillars  on 
which  all  that  is  especially  characteristic  of  mediaeval  Catholi- 
cism rests.  And  in  the  raising  up  of  these  three  pillars  there 
are  necessarily  certain  epochs  specially  memorable.  One — the 
first,  perhaps — of  these  is  the  conversion  of  Constantine.  It  is 
not  alone  the  acceptance  of  Christianity  as  the  state  religion 
which  gives  importance  to  that  event;  but  the  evidence  which 
it  incidentally  brings  to  light  of  the  extent  to  which  the  new 
creed  had  been  preparing  itself  for  that  consummation,  the 
readiness  or  even  alacrity  which  it  displayed  to  accept  a  king- 
dom which  was  of  this  world,  under  the  accompanying  con- 
ditions. As  Milman  says,  the  story  of  the  Battle  of  the 
Milvian  Bridge  and  the  conversion  of  the  Emperor  is  pre- 
eminently significant  for  the  eagerness  which  it  shows  on  the 
part  of  the  Christians  to  receive  the  account  of  a  miracle,  whose 
express  purpose  was  to  convert  the  symbol  of  the  Peace  of  God 
into  an  ensign  of  war.  '  It  was  the  first  advance  to  the  military 
Christianity  of  the  Middle  Ages.'1 

The  quarrel  of  the  Donatists  followed  close  upon  the  establish- 
ment of  the  Church  and  foreshadowed  all  the  future  intestine 
struggles  of  the  Christians.  It  is  noticeable,  however,  that  we 
find  both  parties  in  this  brief  but  sanguinary  struggle  citing  for 
the  warrant  of  their  persecutions  the  authority  of  the  Old 
Testament  rather  than  of  the  New  ;  as  so  many  persecutors 
have  done  throughout  succeeding  ages. 

After  the  Donatist  disputes  followed  the  great  Trinitarian 
controversy,  in  which  Christianity  entered  upon  a  new  phase. 
The  struggle  between  the  Arians  and  Athanasians  occupied  the 
attention  of  the  Church  for  many  succeeding  generations,  and 
she  was  in  this  condition  of  self-absorbtion  when  the  Roman 

1  Hist,  of  Christ.    (1840),  ii.  354-5. 


86  CHRISTENDOM, 

Empire  began  to  shake  and  totter  before  the  onslaughts  of  the 
barbarians.  One  effect  of  this  condition  of  things,  which  is  of 
extreme  importance  for  our  subject,  was  that  the  first  contact 
of  Christianity  and  Teutonic  heathenism  drew  to  itself  little 
attention  by  comparison  with  the  incidents  of  the  Trinitarian 
warfare.  That  controversy,  especially  after  it  has  degenerated 
into  one  between  the  Catholics  and  semi-Arians,  the  struggle 
over  the  Homoiousion  and  Homoousion,  seems  at  the  first 
glance  to  modern  eyes  pitiful  enough.  But  I  do  not  think  it 
was  so  in  reality.  Of  course,  the  subtle  distinction  between 
'of  the  same  substance  or  being'  (Ousia),  or  'of  like  sub- 
stance,' would  be  for  the  vast  majority  of  Christians  an  academic 
question  only ;  such,  too,  I  venture  to  think,  has  always  been 
for  the  great  mass  of  Christians  the  nature,  or  even  the 
existence,  of  the  Third  Person  of  the  Trinity.  But  not  so 
with  the  individuality  of  Christ  Himself.  The  real  question 
which  had  to  be  decided — I  mean  for  the  popular  mind — was 
who  should  be  the  Deity  of  the  Middle  Ages — Christ,  some 
abstract  metaphysical  god,  or  the  Jehovah  of  Judaism.  Man- 
kind had  advanced  to  the  height  of  monotheism.  Other  deities 
might  exist,  deities  of  limited  powers  like  the  gods  of  paganism 
or  heathendom.  These  only  changed  their  names  and  became 
the  angels  or  the  saints  of  the  Church ;  angels  or  daif.iovtg  in 
the  earlier  centuries,  and  in  Gnosticism  and  Manichaeism  ; 
saints,  chiefly,  in  the  Middle  Ages  properly  so  called.  But 
over  all  these  gods  of  polytheism  ruled,  in  place  of  the  con- 
trolling Fate  of  the  classic  drama,  a  controlling  Providence. 
The  question  which  had  to  be  decided,  and  which  Christianity 
decided  triumphantly  in  its  own  sense,  was  whether  Christ  or 
some  other  was  to  represent  this  Providence. 

Art  displays  the  triumph  of  the  cause,  and  in  doing  so  shows 
how  much  popular  religion  was  concerned  in  it.  The  Christ 
of  the  Catacombs — we  all  know  that  youthful,  Apollo-like,  but 


THE  TRINITARIAN  CONTROVERSY.  87 

essentially  human  figure,  or  another  similar  one,  the  'Good 
Shepherd/  copied  from  the  Hermes  Kriophoros  of  Grseco- 
Roman  art.  But  the  Christ  ot  a  few  centuries  later  is  a  severe 
god,  the  Creator  of  the  Earth  and  Heaven,  and  the  Judge  at 
the  Day  of  Doom.1  Such  He  continued  to  be  throughout  the 
Middle  Ages  :  at  the  dawn  of  the  Renaissance  the  First  Person 
of  the  Trinity  begins  to  take  His  proper  place.  And  when  we 
remember  how  much  devotion  there  was  throughout  the  Middle 
Ages  to  the  person  of  Christ,  who  was  looked  upon  sometimes 
as  a  kind  of  feudal  prince  ;  when  we  recall  the  saying  of  Clovis, 
'  If  I  had  been  there  with  my  Franks,  I  would  have  avenged 
His  wrongs,' 2  or  read  that  earliest  of  German  religious  poems, 
the  (so-called)  Heliand  wherein  Christ  appears  somewhat  in  the 
guise  of  a  Saxon  prince,  we  see  how  much  influence  the 
Trinitarian  controversy  had  upon  the  future  relations  of 
Heathendom  and  Christendom. 

In  one  form  or  another  the  Trinitarian  controversy,  we  have 
said,  absorbed  the  attention  of  Christendom  for  many  centuries. 
When  it  finally  died  down  it  left  Christianity  subject  to  fresh 
influences;  and,  to  a  certain  extent,  it  left  behind  it  a  new 
Christianity,  a  Christian  world  reconstituted  by  the  addition  of 
the  barbarian  element.  After  the  death  of  Arianism  and  those 
minor  heresies  which  were  its  offspring,  the  influences  which 
worked  most  powerfully  upon  the  creed  of  Christendom  came 
from  below  rather  than  from  above ;  not  so  much  from  the 
teaching  of  Heresiarchs  or  Doctors  of  the  Church  as  from 
popular  beliefs  and  popular  superstitions.  These  subtle  and 
popular  movements  were  due,  I  take  it,  in  great  measure,  to 
the  survival  of  Paganism  and  Heathendom  among  the  people 
of  Mediaeval  Christendom. 

1  Cf.  Didron,  Iconog.  Chrit.  (1843),  pp.  239,  899.  The  habit  of  bowing 
in  church  exclusively  at  the  name  of  Christ  is  of  course  (as  this  author  notes) 
another  item  of  evidence  in  the  same  direction. 

2  Fredegarius  Epit.  c.  21. 


88  CHRISTENDOM. 


II. 


During  all  these  years  had  been  coming  into  effect  an 
immense  change  in  the  personnel  of  the  Christian  community, 
due  to  the  introduction  of  monasticism  ;  certainly  the  most 
momentous  change  in  that  kind  since  orders  and  the  laying  on 
of  hands  first  became  general  among  Christians.  The  com- 
monly-accepted opinion,  says  Montalembert/  fixes  the  date  of 
the  regular  constitution  of  the  monastic  order  at  the  end  of  the 
third  century — contemporarily,  therefore,  with  the  establishment 
of  Christianity  as  a  state  religion,  a  century  before  the  influx  of 
the  barbarians. 

How  Christian  monasticism  took  its  rise  in  Egypt,  in  the 
Thebaid,  we  know.  Into  what  is  known  or  surmised  of  its 
connection  with  an  earlier  pre  Christian  e-emitism — Jewish  of 
the  Essenes,  or  possibly  even  Hindu  of  the  gymnosophists  — 
we  need  not  inquire.  Its  naturdl  course  was  from  eremitism  to 
coenobitism — from  the  solitary  existence  of  the  hermit  to  that 
of  the  religious  community.  Men  fled  at  fir>t  singly  into  the 
desert.  Some  hermit  of  exceptional  piety  became  famous ; 
disciples  and  imitators  flocked  to  his  neighbourhood ;  some- 
times he  let  them  abide  there  uncared  for,  more  often  he 
consented  to  take  in  one  way  or  another  the  direction  of  their 
life;  and  thus  the  germ  of  a.  ccenobitic  society  took  shape. 
Others,  again,  we  behold  departing  into  the  desert  or  to  some 
spot  rich  in  holy  associations,  with  the  express  object  of 
gathering  comrades  round  them  and  forming  a  community  for 
prayer  and  praise.  Numerous  are  the  names  celebrated,  or  at 
least  commemorated,  as  the  furtherers  of  the  new  movement  in 
the  various  lands  of  Christendom.  But  two  stand  out  above 
the  rest  in  popular  fame,  and  are  thus  familiar  to  us  in  art — 

1  Moines  cT  Occident,  1.  ii. 


MONASTICISM.  89 

Anthony  and  Jerome — Anthony  the  typical  hermit,  Jerome  the 
typical  coenobite. 

The  spread  of  monachisrn  did  not  long  precede  what  is  for 
our  study  the  great  event  of  the  age — the  beginning  of  the 
barbarian  invasions.     It  may  help  us  to  fix  a  date 

AD  410 

to  recall  how  the  news  of  the  fall  of  Rome  before 
the  arms  of  Alaric — that  awful  event  which  seemed  to  shake 
the  ashes  ot  Roman  patriotism  in  its  grave — reached  Jerome 
as  he  was  presiding  over  his  monastic  community  at  Bethlehem, 
and  inspired  Augustine  with  the  thoughts  which  germinated  in 
the  City  of -God.  The  part  which  Anthony  took  in  the  Donatist 
troubles  reminds  us,  on  the  other  hand,  that  with  the  beginnings 
of  the  monastic  institution  are  associated  the  last  persecutions 
of  Christianity  at  the  hands  of  paganism,  and,  following  almost 
immediately  upon  them,  the  first  persecutions  within  the  pale 
of  Christendom. 

It  is,  perhaps,  unnecessary  to  remind  the  reader  how  alto- 
gether outside  the  established  orders  of  the  Church  lay 
monasticism  at  its  foundation;  so  that  for  long  the  monk  was 
not  even  a  priest.  The  rule  of  St.  Benedict — ultimately  the 
rule  for  the  communities  of  Europe— provided  that  one  or  two 
monks  in  each  monastery  should  be  consecrated  priests,  in 
order  that  the  services  might  be  duly  performed  without 
external  aid ;  and  it  was  rare  (at  first)  to  find  any  monk  who 
sought,  as  we  should  say,  '  promotion  '  in  the  Church.  Times 
had  long  greatly  changed  before  we  read  of  Archbishop  Odo, 
of  Canterbury,  that  he  was  the  first  archbishop  who  had  not 
previously  been  a  monk.1  It  may,  I  say,  be  unnecessary  to 
remind  the  reader  of  this  ;  but  the  fact  is  important,  in  view  of 
the  growth  of  that  Sacramental  doctrine  which  we  took  as  the 
third  of  the  great  pillars  upon  which  rested  the  belief  of 
Mediaeval  Christianity. 

1  VitaS.  Osivaldim  Lives  of  the  Archbishops  of  York.    Raine  (Rolls  Ser  ). 


9o  CHRISTENDOM. 

The  East,  the  region  of  deserts — the  East  and  Africa — were 
the  natural  birthplaces  for  the  spirit  of  eremitism,  and  therefore 
of  monasticism.  But  it  was  not  long  before  the  movement 
spread  from  A  rica  and  the  East  to  Europe.  Among  the 
earliest  sites  which  it  cho-e  out  (naturally  enough)  were  the 
countless  islands  of  the  Mediterranean  ;  and  thus  what  the 
lonely  waste  of  sand  expressed  for  the  oriental  monk,  that 
the  boundless  expanse  of  water  symb-lized  to  his  brother  monk 
in  Europe — his  aloofness  from  human  affairs,  his  loneliness 
with  God. 

But  there  were  solitary  places  enough  on  the  mainlands,  deep 
forest  tracts  and  lonely  mountain  tops.  Before  Benedict  had 
come  to  Monte  Cassino  to  lay  the  foundations  of  what  may  be 
called  the  orthodox  monasticism  of  the  West,  the  institution 
had  already  spread  through  Gaul  to  Britain.  Hilary  of 
Poictiers,  Martin  of  Tours  (more  strictly  of  Marmoutiers,  near 
Tours),  are  the  names  most  associated  with  the  spread  of  the 
institution  in  Gaul ;  Martin's  name  pre-eminently  so.  After  this 
saint  was  christened  one  of  the  most  distinguished  among  the 
early  foundations  in  this  country,  Candida  Casa,  or  Whithern, 
on  the  Sol  way  Bay.1  That  one  legend  made  it  the  school  of 
Patrick  shows  at  least  the  veneration  in  which  was  held  this 
eldest  child  of  Gaulish  monasticism.2 

In  this  wise — to  go  back  to  the  image  with  which  this  volume 
opens — we  see  the  march  of  this  new  social  and  religious  force 
following  close  upon  the  heels  of  Christianity  itself,  and 
travelling  along  the  routes  which  the  Roman  Empire  had 
prepared  for  it ;  and  we  see,  almost  at  the  same  moment,  the 
German  barbarians  stepping  in  from  the  East. 

1  Beda,  H.  E.  iii.  4. 

2  On  its  relation  to  Irish  monasticism,  see  Skene,  Celt.  Scotl.  ii.  46. 


PATRICK.  91 

III. 

It  was   about  the  time  attributed  to   the  coming  of  the 

Angles   and   Saxons   into  Britain — in   those  suspicious  three 

keels    which    figure   so   often  in   Teutonic   legend — that    the 

Roman-Armorican  Patricius  began  his  great  mission 

A  "D  circ  427 
in  Ireland ;  and  as  in  the  eastern    British   island 

the  sphere  of  Christianity  was  being  continually  narrowed 
by  the  conquests  of  the  heathen,  new  territory  was  being 
gained  for  it  in  the  western.1  After  the  settlement  of  the 
Angles  and  Saxons  a  broad  belt  of  Teutons  was  spread  be- 
tween all  the  Celtic  people  in  the  British  Islands  and  their 
brethren  on  the  Continent.  For  some  time,  too,  a  belt  of 
heathenism  separated  in  the  same  way  the  Christians  of 
Britain,  of  Caledonia,  and  Hibernia,  from  the  main  body  of 
their  co-religionists ;  so  that  they  may  have  been  half-forgotten 
by  the  rest  of  the  Christian  world ;  nothing  on  this  side  of 
them  but  unconverted  barbarians,  nothing  beyond  them  but,  as 
a  Greek  would  have  said,  the  deep-flowing  stream  of  Ocean  and 
the  dark  groves  of  Persephone.  But  in  the  course 
of  time  there  arose  that  beacon  of  the  West, 
Columba,  who  lit  up  such  a  flame  ot  piety  and  learning  in 
Ireland  that  the  light  of  it  shone  out  over  all  Western  Europe. 
The  monasticism  of  Ireland  drew  its  inspiration  from  Africa, 
from  the  eremites  of  the  Thebaid  ;  or,  if  with  any  European 
intermediary,  from  the  monks  of  the  islands,  before  the  estab- 
lishment of  Benedict's  reformed  monastery  on  Monte  Cassino. 
We  might,  not  too  fancifully,  I  think,  call  the  two  European 

1  St.  Patrick  was  born  A-D.  373.  which  is,  by  the  way,  about  the  date  of 
the  establishment  of  Ermanrik's  empire  in  Russia.  His  first  mission  to 
Ireland  fell  probably  about  a.d.  397  ;  but  his  great  mission  not  till  after 
427.  He  died  circ.  463.  He  was  not,  of  course,  the  first  Christian 
missionary  to  the  Irish  (Scots),  but  the  first  who  made  any  sensible  impres- 
sion :  his  death,  even,  was  followed  by  a  partial  apostacy  among  the  Irish 
Christians. 


92  CHRISTENDOM. 

orders  that  of  the  sea  and  that  of  the  mountains.  To  the  monks 
of  the  sea  belonged  mystic  piety,  free  speculation,  a  measure  of 
physical  sloth  ;  to  the  monks  of  the  mountains,  severity,  order, 
and  rigid  obedience.  In  the  matter  of  obedience,  however, 
Columba  effected  a  great  improvement  among  his  own 
brethren.  The  Irish  monks  gathered  themselves  more  strictly 
into  religious  communities,  and  adopted  a  rule  which  was  in  the 
main  the  rule  of  St.  Columba.  I  guard  myself  from  calling 
these  new  establishments  religious  houses  ;  for  such  they  were 
not.  They  were  no  more  than  groups  of  wooden  huts — no 
Irish  shaniy  of  to-day  so  small  as  they  were — each  for  its  single 
occupant.1  It  was  a  group  of  hermits  carrying,  snail-like, 
their  cells  with  them ;  the  same  had  been  the  growth  of 
religious  communities  in  the  Thebaid.  '  Let  a  narrow  place 
with  one  door  contain  them,'  ran  the  rule  of  St.  Columba. 
The  whole  group  was  girt  round  with  a  slight  defensive  vallum. 
or  mud  wall.  In  the  midst  stood  a  small  oratory  containing  a 
shrine,  with  the  relics,  it  may  be,  of  some  saintly  founder.  The 
oratories  were  at  first  called  duirlech,  or  dairtech,  houses  of 
wood  (oak).2  Later  on  they  became  houses  of  stone,  and  a 
stone  belfry  was  added.  Such  was  the  Irish  monastery  of 
Columba's  day,  the  foyer  of  so  much  that  influenced  the  future 
history  of  Christendom. 

Before  long  these  monasteries  gained  a  great  veneration 
from  the  religious-superstitious  Hibernians.  The  more  famous 
became  in  the  midst  of  a  poor  population  the  storehouses  of 
precious  gifts  in  gold  and  silver  and  jewels,  in  that  fine  twisted 
work  which  is  so  characteristic  of  the  goldsmith's  art  in  Ireland. 
And  this  treasure  proved  their  own  destruction  in  after-years, 
when  the  Vikings  came. 

1  Skene,  Celt.  Scot!.,  ii.  57,  and  Adamnan,  Vita  S.  Columba,  Bks.  i.,  ii. 
Stone  cells  for  anchorites  were  not,  however,  unknown,  and  it  is  not  prob- 
able that  such  were  unknown  in  the  monasteries.      Cf.  Celt.  Sc,  ii.  70. 

a  This  etymology  of  dairtech  is  not  certain. 


IRISH  MONASTICISM.  93 

I  know  not  whether  it  was  any  survival  from  the  traditions 
of  the  far-off  founders  of  their  order,  but  certain  it  is  that 
Columba  and  the  great  institutors  of  monasteries  in  his  day 
chose  still  to  build  by  the  side  of  the  water — on  some  one  of 
the  countless  islands  off  the  Irish  coast  or  in  the  lakes,  or  upon 
some  promontory  overlooking  the  sea.1  Such  a  habit  served  to 
mark  the  distinction  between  their  life,  the  religious  life  of 
Ireland,  and  the  secular  life.  For  the  latter  had  in  those  days 
little  connection  with  the  sea.  The  ports  which  Ireland  has 
she  owes  to  the  Vikings.  Now  her  capital  cities,  Dublin, 
Belfast,  Cork,  are  at  these  ports.  Then  the  capital,  Tara,  was 
inland,  in  the  '  Middle  Kingdom,'  so-called."  The  site  of 
Dublin  was  then  only  the  Black  Pool,  or  the  Ford  of  the 
Hurdles. 3  There  was  no  commerce,  there  were  no  ports  in 
those  days.  There  was  fishing,  of  course,  for  which  the  rude 
skin-covered  wicker  coracles  sufficed  ;  and  these  boats  were 
presently,  as  we  shall  see,  made  use  of  by  another  kind  of 
fishers,  fishers  of  men. 

There  was  thus  a  natural  fitness  in  this  uprearing  of  monas- 
teries as  near  as  might  be  to  the  edge  of  all  secular  life.  And 
for  those  which  looked  out  westward  or  to  the  north,  there  must, 
as  one  fancies,  have  been  an  unending  fascination  in  gazing 
nightly  toward  the  gates  of  the  setting  sun  and  the  doors  of 
Paradise. 

One  of  the  most  famous  of  the  Irish  monastic  foundations 
was  Bangor,  on  the  coast  of  County  Down.  It  was  the  foun- 
dation of  Comgall,  the  friend  of  Columba  :  Columba  himself 

1  '  The  small  islands  round  the  coast  or  in  the  inland  lochs  appear  to  have 
possessed  an  irresistible  attraction  for  the  founders  of  these  monasteries ' 
(Skene,  0.  c.  ii.  62). 

2  Meath,  MiddJie  =  i  Middle  [Country].'  Not,  of  course,  that  the  kingdom 
of  Meath  was  or  is  in  the  middle  of  Ji eland. 

3  Dubh-linn  =  black  pool  [Blackpool,  Liverpool].  The  usual  name  for 
Dublin,  when  the  Vikings  first  made  a  settlement  there,  was  Ath-Cliath, 
'  the  ford  of  the  hurdles,' 


94  CHRISTENDOM. 

had  lived  there.  From  it  came  those  two  great  missionaries 
to  continental  Europe,  Columban  and  Gall.  Tory  Island,  off 
the  coast  of  Donegal,  was  a  foundation  of  Columba's  own.  So 
was  Derry,  which  amid  its  deep  oak  woods x  had  no  outlook 
save  towards  the  sea.  The  Arran  islands  had  each  its  monas- 
tery :  another,  where  the  town  of  Limerick  now  stands — as  a 
town  Limerick  was  founded  by  the  Vikings ;  many  in  Cork 
harbour,  in  Wexford  harbour;  one  Columba's  foundation,  on 
Rechrea  (now  Lambey),  off  Dublin  county.  The  inland  lakes 
had  their  share.  Five  monasteries  on  the  islands  of  Lough 
Ree  alone — in  Lough  Neagh,  Lough  Corrib,  Lough  Derg,  their 
due  number.  On  the  Shannon,  midway  between  Lough  Derg 
and  Lough  Ree,  stood  one  of  the  most  long  and  widely-famed 
of  Irish  monasteries,  which,  for  the  sake  of  its  annals,  the 
student  of  Irish  history  gratefully  remembers — Clonmacnoise  ; 
St.  Kieran  was  its  patron,  a  contemporary  of  Columba. 

Columba  was  not  content  with  reforming  the  monasticism  of 
his  own  country.  His  great  achievement  was  the  conversion 
of  his  monastic  Church  into  a  missionary  Church.  Driven 
out  of  his  native  land,  he  carried  with  him  a  community  of 
monks  to  Hy — the  place  which  we  to-day  miscall  Iona — the 
small  island  lying  alongside  of  Mull;  a  world-famous  place, 
which  through  Columba  became,  as  it  were,  the  Delos  of 
Western  Christendom. 

The  roving  spirit  of  the  Irish  fitted  them  for  the  missionary 
labours  to  which  they  were  destined.  In  the  half-mythic  lives 
of  the  early  Irish  saints  there  are  many  histories  of  adventure 
by  sea  ;  and  this,  in  spite  of  the  rudeness  of  their  art  of  ship- 
building, far  behind  what  obtained  upon  the  other  side  of  the 
known  world,  the  coasts  of  the  Baltic.  St.  Bridget  is  said  to 
have  gone  to  Scotland,  to  Scotland  proper,  Scotland  of  the 

1  T>txxy=Daire,  an  oak  wood. 


COLUMBAS  FOUNDA TJON  A  T  HY.  95 

Scots,  or  Irish  Scotland,  as  it  rrrght  be  called.1  She  passed, 
among  other  places,  up  the  Kilbrennan  Sound,2  and  there  are 
many  churches  in  Bute  and  Kintyre  said  to  have  been  founded 
by  her.  But  the  most  famous  of  all  these  mythic,  or  half- 
mythic  voyages  was  that  of  St.  Brandan,  which  grew  and  grew 
in  mediaeval  legend  till  it  became  at  last  a  sort  of  proto- 
Columbian  voyage  upon  the  Atlantic  in  search  of  the  Earthly 
Paradise.3 

But   the   great  age   of  missionary  achievement 
begins  with  Columba's  foundation  at  Hy. 

South-eastern  Scotland  was  in  these  days  Pictish,  and  Chris- 
tian after  a  fashion.  This  was  no  great  territory;  for  the 
English  conquests  extended  as  far  as  the  Forth.  South-west 
Scotland,  Argyllshire  and  the  southern  isles,  were  Christian  too, 
and  Scottish,  that  is  to  say  Irish  in  their  inhabitants.  South- 
ward this  kingdom  extended  to  the  Clyde :  beyond  the  Clyde 
lay  the  British  kingdom  of  Strathclyde.  To  the  north  the 
boundary  between  this  original  Scotland  and  the  land  of  the 
northern  Picts  was  Lock  Levin,  the  present  boundary  between 
Argyllshire  and  Inverness,  to  which  Mull  lies  just  opposite. 
Northern  Pictland  was  still  heathen  ;  so  that  Columba  had  to 
the  south  of  him  co-religionists  and  kinsmen,  but  immediately 
to  the  north  strangers  and  heathens. 

What    powers   of    persuasion   and   of   menace   lay   in   the 

1  The  name  Scot  being  at  that  time  the  designation  of  an  Irishman,  not 
of  a  Scotchman. 

2  Sound  of  the  Church  of  St.  Brandan. 

3  During  St.  Brandan's  famous  and  fabulous  voyage  to  the  W.  or  N.W. 
he  came,  the  legend  says,  to  an  island  called  the  Island  of  Sheep.  '  At 
last,  by  purveyance  of  God,  they  came  to  a  fuld  fayre  ylonde  ful  of  green 
pasture,  wherein  were  the  whytest  and  gretest  shepe  that  ever  hee  saw  ' 
{Golden  Legend,  Wynkyn  de  Worde).  This  may  have  been  the  Faroes 
{far  eyar — sheep  islands)  :  a  summer  picture,  no  doubt.  Dccuil  {De  Men- 
sura  0>bis)  also  notices  the  number  of  sheep  on  some  of  the  islands  of  the 
far  West  in  his  day,  a.  u.  825. 


96  CHRISTENDOM. 

preachings  of  that  perfervid  Scotchman  with  his  stately 
presence  and  sonorous  voice 1  we  can  only  guess  ;  for  the 
romantic  instinct  of  those  days  preferred  to  attribute  to  a 
miracle  the  slow  results  of  human  effort.  The  picturesque 
legend  tells  how  Columba  came  to  the  capital  of  the  heathen 
Pictish  king,  Brude  Mac  Maelchon.  But  the  king  would  have 
none  of  him,  and  ordered  the  palace  gates  to  be  shut  in  the 
face  of  the  missionaries.  The  saint  stood  up,  with  his  two 
disciples  Comgall  and  Cennaeth  2  beside  him,  and  made  a 
cross  upon  the  doors.  They  at  once  flew  open  ;  and  the  king 
came  forth  trembling.3  Henceforward  the  work  of  conversion 
went  on  apace,  and  the  highlands  often  echoed  to  the  voices  of 
Columba  and  his  followers. 

Columba  passed  on,  founding  fresh  monasteries  all  up  the 
western  coast  of  Scotland.  His  disciple  Cormac  carried  his 
work  further  by  the  Christianization  of  the  Orkneys.  And 
wherever  almost  a  new  monastery  was  established,  it3  like  its 
p-edecessors  in  Ireland  and  Scotland,  was  placed,  if  possible, 
upon  an  island,  or  upon  the  seashore  close  to  the  waves.  The 
eremite  spirit,  the  Theban  spirit,  was  not  dead,  and  some 
zealous  and  solitary  souls  chose  our  lone  hermitages  on  barren 
rocks  and  preached  to  the  fishes  and  sea-birds  there. 

It  was  in  truth  a  wonderful  life,  this  of  the  Irish  monk,  alone  or 
in  communion,  in  his  narrow  hut,  looking  out  upon  the  eternal 
seas — to  us  an  inconceivable  life.  We  have  to  read  some  of 
their  poems  to  guess  how  much  they  loved  these  pensive 
citadels  of  theirs,  and  how  strongly  nature  in  her  wild  aspects 
wrought  upon  them.  '  Beloved  ' — says  one  such  poem,  called 
a  poem  of  Columba,  speaking  of  some  of  his  foundations — 

Beloved  are  Durrow  and  Derry, 
Beloved  is  pure  Raphoe 


1  Cf.  Adamnan,  VitaS.  Col.  (Reeves)  i.  c.  29,  and  Reeves,  note,  p.  260. 
8   Vita  S.  Comgall.  3  Adamnan,  0.  c,  ii.  36. 


IRISH  M0NAST1CISM.  97 

Beloved  is  Drumhome,  the  fruitful, 
Beloved  are  Swords  and  Kells  ; 
But  sweeter  and  lovelier  far 
The  salt  sea  where  the  sea-gulls  fly.1 

Does  this  history  seem  to  linger  too  long  over  the  early 
foundations  of  the  Irish  Church  ?  It  is  with  an  express  pur- 
pose. I  take  the  cream  of  all  history  to  lie  in  the  contrast 
between  the  changing  activities  of  man  brought  face  to  face  with 
the  unchanged  features  of  nature.  And  these  contrasts  arise 
not  out  of  the  lapse  of  time  alone,  but  from  difference  of 
development.  .  In  the  present  case  I  have  desired  to  bring  into 
relief  the  contrasted  pictures  of  two  peoples  dwelling  by  the 
sea — the  Irish  and  Scottish  monks  in  the  far  north-west,  the 
Scandinavian  nations  in  the  far  north-east.  These  typify  for 
us  a  part  of  the  manifold  contrast  between  Heathendom  and 
Christendom. 

Let  the  reader,  if  he  will,  stand  in  fancy  by  the  salt  sea, 
where  the  sea-gulls  fly,  and  watch  the  birds  as  they  wing 
westward  toward  the  setting  sun,  with  the  eye  of  an  Irish 
monk,  alone,  untroubled,  dreaming,  and  praying.  And  again 
let  him  watch  the  water-fowl — the  swans,  say — rising  from  the 
Viks  of  the  Baltic  in  serried  array,  clanging  through  the  air  in 
Hamal's  fylking  far  overhead,  and  flying  southward  :  let  him 
watch  this  sight  with  the  eye  of  a  Northman  who  is  himself  ere 
long  to  follow  them  upon  their  southward  journey. 

And  this  connection  and  contrast  of  the  east  and  west  is  not 
fanciful  nor  arbitrary.  For  it  so  happens  that  while  the  Vikings 
were  brought  into  some  sort  of  relation  with  almost  every 
country  of  Europe  and  with  all  kinds  and  degrees  of  Christians, 
their  relations  with  the  Irish  monks  were  peculiar  in  kind  and 
in  degree,  and  in  their  results;  as  we  shall  see  hereafter. 

1  See  also  a  longer  and  very  beautiful  poem  quoted  by  Skene,  Celtic 
Scotland,  ii.  92. 

8 


98  CHRISTENDOM. 

What  arts  might  a  man  not  know,  what  thoughts  might  he 
not  think  in  this  little  world!  He  kept  up  his  scholarship; 
read  in  Greek  almost  alone  among  the  learned  of  Northern 
Europe;  occupied  himself  in  the  beautiful  gold  and  silver 
work,  and  still  more  beautiful  illuminations  which  have  come 
down  to  us  from  that  age.  The  Irish  art  work  is  peculiar  ;  its 
marked  characteristics  are  the  elaborate  interlaced  patterns 
which  seem  almost  to  defy  human  ingenuity  to  carry  out  their 
twists  and  windings.  When  you  scrutinize  them  closely  you 
find,  moreover,  that  these  patterns  are  made  up  of  fantastic 
animals.  It  is  a  peculiarity  which  runs  through  Irish  metal 
work  and  illumination  alike,  and  is  even  imitated  in  a  very 
inappropriate  fashion  on  Irish  stone  carvings.  Probably  most 
readers  are  best  acquainted  with  these  last,  especially  on  the 
crosses  called  Irish  crosses,  though  they  are  found  in  other  coun- 
tries, notably  in  the  Scandinavian.  These  interlaced  patterns  are 
probably  derived  in  the  first  instance  from  the  wattling  of  twigs 
or  reeds — and  so  with  one  hand  they  reach  back  to  pre- 
historic art,  in  which  wattling,  or  platting,  was  one  of  the  earliest 
and  most  important  industries.1  But  on  the  other  hand  this 
twisted  scroll-work  is  the  parent  of  the  art  which  is  characteris- 
tically Scandinavian.  It  was  imported  by  the  Vikings  into  the 
north,  and  has  remained  implanted  in  the  Scandinavian  coun- 
tries up  to  the  present  day,  though  it  has  been  abandoned 
elsewhere.2 

Again  the  extraordinary  prevalence  of  the  animal  forms  in 
Irish  art  work  touches  some  of  the  characteristics  of  Gothic 


1  Wattle,  connected  with  the  toot  vi  (Skr.  ve)  in  vitis,  vimen,  Slavonic 
wetla,  a  '  willow,'  and  Sansk.  vetra,  a  reed.  The  number  of  the  names  of 
plants  (for  several  more  might  be  added)  derived  from  the  process  of 
wattling,  or  weaving,  indicates  the  importance  of  the  process  in  prehistoric 
times.     Of  course  weaving  \n  prehistoric  days  was  only  platting. 

2  Some  of  the  Irish  work  appears  to  have  found  its  Way  imo  Scandinavia 
before  the  Viking  Age  began  ;  see  Montelius,  Sveriges  Forntid. 


1  HE  BA  RBA  RIA  N  I  A  VA  SI  ON.  99 

architecture  at  a  much  later  date  ;  though  in  this  case  I  am 
unable  to  say  whether  the  connection  is  fortuitous  or  really  that 
of  parentage  and  descent. 

The  Irish  monk  speculated  freely,  and  was  far  away  from 
the  control  of  Pope  or  Council.  He  saw  strange  visions,  and 
this,  too,  was  natural  to  one  who  lived  so  near  the  borders  of 
the  world. 

IV. 

Let  us  pause  for  a  moment  at  this  point  to  make  surer  our 
ground  in  the  general  history  of  Europe ;  for  while  these 
changes  had  been  going  on  in  a  remote  corner,  events  of 
world-wide  importance  had  been  transacted  elsewhere.  We 
have  not,  of  course,  to  trace  the  history  of  these  great  events  ; 
but  some  of  the  epochs  of  that  history,  some  of  the  dates 
belonging  to  it,  may  hold  our  attention  for  a  moment. 

What  we  have  been  chiefly  concerned  with  hitherto  has  been 
the  spread  of  the  monastic  movement,  firstly  in  Europe, 
secondly  in  Ireland.  It  begins  in  Europe  almost  contem- 
poraneously with  the  beginning  of  the  barbarian  invasions,  that 
is  at  the  end  of  the  fourth  century  ;  St.  Patrick's  great  mission 
to  Ireland  falls  about  a.d.  427.  Precisely  a  hundred  years  later 
was  born  Columba  (527);  a.d.  563  is  the  date  of  the  foundation 
of  the  monastery  at  Hy.  From  a.d.  565  to  575  were  the  years 
spent  in  the  conversion  of  the  Picts.  These  are  the  dates  for 
the  Irish  and  Scottish  Church  :  what  of  the  great  contemporary 
events  in  Europe  ? 

We  know  that  there  are  two  great  eras  of  the  barbarian 
invasion  of  the  Roman  Empire  :  one  that  begins  at  the  end  of 
the  fourth  century  ;  the  other  more  nearly  the  end  of  the  fifth. 
The  first  is  the  era  of  two  great  invasion*,  that  of 

A.U.   ojo. 

the  Visi-Goths  from  the  Lower   Danube  (a.d.  395— 

400),  and  that  of  the  Suevi,  Burgundiaris,  Alam,  Vandals  into 


ioo  CHRISTENDOM. 

Gaul  (a.d.  405)  across  the  frozen  Rhine.     The  second  era  is 

connected  with  the  nations  of  the  Ostro-Goths,  and  the  Franks, 

with  Theodoric's  conque.t  of  Italy,  a.d.  493,  and 

with  Clovis's  empire  in    Gaul,  which  begins  with 

the    victory  gained    over    Syagrius  at  Soissons  in 

A.D.  486.  J    b  J    to 

A.D.  486. 

Between  these  two  eras  lies  the  one  which  has  such  an 
especial  interest  for  us,  that  of  the  settlement  of  the  Angles 
and  Saxons  in  Brltan  (from  a.d.  449  ?).  By  comparing  these 
dates  we  are  in  a  position  to  see  w  .at  was  the  relationship  in 
time  between  the  establishment  of  the  Irish  monastic  Church 
and  the  course  of  Teutonic  invasion  of  Europe. 

Some  only  among  these  barbarian  invasions  were  in  the  strict 
sense  heathen  invasions.  For  the  conversion  of  the  German 
nationalities  had  begun  much  earlier ;  and  before  they  broke 
down  the  barrier  of  Roman  power  most  of  the  incoming  Teu- 
tonic peoples  had  abandoned  the  creed  of  their  forefathers. 
Not  much  notice,  as  we  have  said,  was  taken  in  the  midst  of 
the  Trinitarian  controversy  of  the  labours  of  the  missionaries 
among  the  heathens.  But  one  missionary  at  least,  Ulfila,  the 
apostle  of  the  Goths,  has  left  behind  him  his  own  memorial, 
a  KTTjfia  tf  aei,  in  the  gospels  which  he  translated  into  the  Gothic 
tongue. 

From  the  Visigoths,  the  first  invaders,  while  they  were  still 
half-unconverted,  comes  to  us,  moreover,  one  of  the  rare  and  slight 
existing  memoiials  of  heathendom.  M  my  of  the  Goths  had 
already  become  Christians,  but  in  their  king  (one  of  their  two 
kings  or  judges),  Athanaric,  they  possessed  a  stern  upholder  of 
the  ancient  faith.  When  Athanaric  saw  his  people  falling  away 
to  Christianity  he  began  an  active  persecution  of  the  con- 
verts. As  a  test  of  their  conformity  he  sent  round  among  the 
villages  of  the  Visigoths  a  waggon  bearing  an  idol ;  those  who 
refused  to  worship.it  were  burnt,  along  with  their  families.     It 


CONVERSION  OF  THE  FRANKS.  101 

cannot,  I  think,  have  been  Odin,  Thor,  or  Frey,  or  Balder,  who 
was  carried  round  in  this  wise ;  for  we  are  told  that  the 
Teutons  did  not  make  images  of  these  gods.  It  was  more 
probably  Nerthus.  For  as  she,  si  credere  vetis,  was  herself 
bathed  in  a  secret  lake  in  the  Baltic  island,  she  must  have  had 
a  corporeal  presence.  There  must  have  been  some  image  of 
her,  however  carefully  it  was  kept  concealed.  And  she  was  the 
one  likely  to  be  carried  round  from  place  to  place  among  the 
people. 

This  persecution  by  Athanaric  is  a  rare  instance.  As  a  rule 
the  Germans  passed  over  from  their  old  creed  to  the  new 
one  without  difficulty  or  noise,  without  preserving  any  overt 
memorials  of  the  past :  the  ineradicable  effects  of  centuries  of 
belief  they  could  not  but  preserve.  It  was  not  as  heathens  but 
as  Arians  that  the  Goths  and  Burgundians  incurred  the  hatred  of 
the  subject  Romans.  The  conversion  of  the  early  wanderers  was 
all  the  easier  because  they  were  wanderers.  Primitive  creeds 
are  so  much  attached  to  the  soil ;  they  depend  so  much  upon 
local  associations,  upon  groves  wherein  a  Wodin  has  been  born, 
upon  islands  where  a  Nerthus  has  her  home.  Mohammedanism 
has  been  a  conquering  creed,  just  on  account  of  its  pure  mono- 
theism, its  slight  association  with  objects  of  sense — such  even 
as  images  or  shrines.  Mediaeval  Catholicism  had  far  less 
power  ;  and  the  very  descendants  of  the  servants  and  warriors 
of  the  Cross,  when  they  had  been  settled  a  little  while  in  Asia, 
relapsed  into  a  sort  of  paganism. 

But  in  return  for  their  facile  conversion,  the  Germans  were 
allowed  to  import  into  Christianity  no  small  part  of  the  spirit 
of  their  ancient  creed,  and  that  peculiar  growth,  the  chivalric 
creed  of  the  Middle  Ages,  was  chiefly  their  creation  ;  it  from 
this  time  began  to  take  shape  and  to  transform  Christianity. 
The  fair  Valkyriur  were  abandoned,  and  began  to  change  into 
witches.     Perhaps  that  story  of  the  origin  of  the  Huns  was  not 


102  CHRISTENDOM. 

a  pure  heathen  invention,  but  due  to  the  decline  of  the  heathen 
wise-women  in  popular  estimation.  But  the  beliefs  and  senti- 
ments which  had  fostered  the  worship  of  Nerthus  and  of  the 
maidens  of  Wodin,  were  transferred  to  the  mother  of  Christ ; 
and  from  the  fifth  and  sixth  centuries  the  worship  of  the  Virgin 
began  to  take  a  conspicuous  place  in  the  popular  creed.1 

As  distinguished  from  the  earliest  barbarian  invaders,  or  from 
all  the  Teutonic  invaders  in  the  South,  the  Franks  and  the 
Saxons  came  in  as  heathens.  This  was  afterwards  reckoned  a 
happy  circumstance  by  the  Catholics ;  for  Arianism  had  lost 
its  power  at  the  day  of  their  conversion,  and  they  were  the  first 
strong  supporters  which  the  Trinitarian  party  found  among  the 
barbarians. 

To  a  certain  extent,  moreover,  the  Franks  were  predisposed 
to  favour  the  Roman  party  in  Gaul.  The  fatal  habit  of 
division  among  the  German  nationalities,  which  has  so  often 
paralyzed  the  effect  of  their  victories,  was  beginning  to  be  felt 
at  the  opening  of  the  second  era  of  conquest.  The  same 
influences  which  in  the  dawn  of  German  history  had  turned 
Segestes  against  Arminius,  or  made  Maroboduus  hesitate 
between  his  countrymen  and  their  enemies,  now  sent 
Theodoric,  with  the  sanction  of  the  emperor,  to  the  over- 
throw of  Odovacar,  and  Clovis,  with  the  title  of  consul, 
against  the  Visigoths  and  Burgundians.  Childaric,  Clovis's 
father,  was  a  friend  of  the  Romans,  and  not  ill-disposed  to 
the  Christian  faith.  St.  Genevieve  (Genoveva)  wrought  in 
his  presence  a  miracle  precisely  similar  to  that  which  Columba 
a  century  later  wrought  before  Brude  Mac  Mselchon.  Childeric 
had  ordered  the  gates  of  his  palace,  at  Parish,  to  be  closed 


1  The  Virgin  is,  on  the  contrary,  never  mentioned  by  St.  Patrick  in  his 
extant  sermons,  see  Whitley  Stokes,  Tripa,7-tite  Life  (Rolls  Series),  clxi. 


THE  BAPTISM  OF  CLOVIS.  103 

against  Genevieve,  but  the  bolts  flew  back  when  the  saint  drew 
near. 

Chlodowig  carried  on  the  schemes  of  his  father  for  the 
founding  of  a  Frankish  power  upon  the  subjection  of  the  other 
Teutonic  nationalities.  So  little  was  he  echt  deutsch  at  heart  that 
he  bethought  him  in  his  war  with  the  Alamanni  of  invoking  the 
power  of  the  Romans'  god  against  the  gods  of  his  forefathers. 
His  prayer  was  followed  by  his  victory  of  Tolbiac 
(Ziilpich),  and  the  result  of  that — an  event  of 
world-wide  importance — was  the  baptism  of  Clovis  himself 
and  the  greater  part  of  the  Frankish  army. 

When  the  turmoil  of  the  two  contemporary  Teutonic 
conquests  died  down,  the  conquests  of  the  Franks  in  Gaul, 
and  of  the  English  in  Britain,  the  intercourse  between  the 
latter  country  and  Continental  Europe,  which,  when  interrupted, 
had  erased  our  island  from  the  roll  of  the  lands  of  the  living 
and  numbered  it  among  the  lands  of  the  dead,  was  re- 
established once  more.  Intermarriages  between  the  two 
ruling  houses  here  and  in  Gaul — the  house  of  Hengist  and 
the  house  of  Clovis — took  place.  Trade  travelled  once  more 
along  the  Roman  roads,  and  embarked  from  Roman  port  to 
Roman  port.  The  earliest  Saxon  coinage,  which  we  may  date 
about  the  time  of  the  marriage  of  King  Ethelberht  and  Queen 
Berchta,  shows  unmistakable  signs  of  having  been  imitated 
from  the  corresponding  coinage  of  the  Merovingians. *  And 
as  a  result  of  intermarriage  and  of  this  renewed  intercourse  the 


'o 


creed  of  Rome,  which  had  just  one  century  before 
conquered  the  Franks,  made  with  Augustine  its 
first  landing  in  England. 

The  poetry  of  the  episode  of  the  conversion  of  the  English 
attaches  itself  more  to  the  Church  of  Northumbria  than  to  that 

1  Catalogue  of  English  Coins  in  the  British  Museum,  C.  F.  Keary,  vol.  i. 
pp.  xi.  sqq. 


KM  CHRISTENDOM. 

of  Kent ;  only,  perhaps,  because  its  vates  sacer  was  a  North- 
umbrian. Whatever  of  this  history  we  forget,  we  are  sure  to 
retain  the  picture  of  King  Eadwine,  of  Northumbria,  driven  out 
from  his  native  land — in  the  true  tradition  of  all  those  heroes 
dearest  to  the  Teutonic  imagination — wandering  forlornly  from 
place  to  place,  and  dependent  upon  the  precarious  hospitality  of 
whatever  prince  might  venture  to  give  him  shelter ;  then  as  he 
hears  of  the  intended  treachery  of  his  host,  and  yet  in  mere 
despair  cannot  bring  himself  to  decide  on  any  new  plan,  there 
appears  to  him  in  a  vision  a  stranger  in  strange  attire  who  tells 
him  that  his  enemy  is  dead  and  gives  him  a  secret  sign  by 
which  he  shall  know  the  prophet  again. x  Not  otherwise  in 
many  a  heathen  saga  does  Wodin  the  wanderer  come  to  some 
favourite  hero,  and  in  the  same  way  give  him  a  secret  token  of 
his  changed  fortune.  But  this  time,  when  Eadwine  meets  the 
subject  of  his  vision  in  the  flesh,  he  proves  to  be,  not  Wodin 
but  the  missionary  Paulinus  sent  from  Kent  to  Northumbria. 
This  change  in  the  personality  of  the  Wise  Old  Man  symbolizes 
the  transition  from  heathenism  to  Christianity  in  the  north. 

So  far  reached  the  wave  of  conversion  which  came  direct 
from  Rome.  But  here  it  received  a  check.  Christianity  in 
Northumbria  was  for  a  while  held  back,  much  as  the  Christianity 
of  Ulfila's  preaching  had  been  held  in  check  by  the  fierce 
heathenism  of  Athanaric.  The  Athanaric  of  Heptarchic  Eng- 
and  was  Penda,  King  of  Mercia.  He  did  not  scruple  to  join 
forces  with  the  enemies  of  his  race,  the  Britons  ;  and  the  united 
armies  of  Mercia  and  Strathclyde  met  the  Northumbrians  at 
rieathfield,  where  Eadwine  was  defeated  and  slain. 2     This  was 

a  -n  R-it     m  ^33-     A  date  has  no  meaning  in  itself.     But  we 

may  remember  that  it  was  just  seventy  years,  two 

generations,  since  Columba  had  settled  his  community  at  Iona, 

1  Beda,  H.  E.,  ii.  12.  a  Ibid.,  ii.  20. 


OSWALD  AND  PENDA.  105 

and  one  generation  after  his  death.  It  was  ninety  years  after 
the  birth  of  Columbanus,  the  great  IrMi  missionary  to  Con- 
tinental Europe ;  and  ninety  years,  too,  after  the  death  of 
Benedict  on  Monte  Cassino.  That  is  the  chronology  of  the 
event  reckoned  by  the  history  of  Western  monasticism. 

V. 

The  task  of  harrying  Northumbria  and  slaying  its  Christian 
inhabitants  fell  rather  to  the  Christian  Ceadwalla     .  _  nnA 

A.D.  634. 

than  to  Penda.  *  Soon  a  new  ruler  of  Northumbria 
appeared,  the  son  of  Eadwine's  ancient  rival  yEthelfrith  the 
Fierce.  This  ruler,  Oswald,  was  a  Christian  who  had  learnt 
his  Christianity  in  the  school  of  Iona.  Northumbria  had 
now  almost  fallen  back  into  heathenism  ;  but  under  Oswald's 
protection  a  new  race  of  missionaries  came  into  the  kingdom 
from  the  north,  and  the  great  era  of  Columban  monasticism  in 
England  began. 2  The  wave  which  had  flowed  northward  from 
Rome  spent  itself  when  Eadwine  fell  at  Heathfield.  The  re- 
turning wave  from  the  distant  forgotten  north  began  to  flow 
into  England,  when  Oswald  brought  Scottish  Christianity  back 
with  him  into  Northumbria.  Paganism,  however,  was  not  yet 
extinct;  and  a  second  time  the  arms  of  Northumbria  went 
down  before  those  of  Penda  and  his  Mercians,  and  Oswald 
met  his  death  at  Maserfeld  (Oswestry).3  East  Anglian  Chris- 
tianity, too,  was  for  a  while  rooted  out.  Three  kings  of  the 
East  Angles  fell  in  succession  before  Penda.  At  last,  however, 
that  champion  of  the  ancient  creed  was  himself 
defeated  and  slain  by  Oswiu,  the  brother  and 
successor  of  Oswald. 

And  now  the  Columbian   Church   spread  its  influence  un- 
checked through  England.     Aidan,  the  new  apostle  of  North- 

1  Beda,  I.e.  *  Ibid.,  Hi.  ?.  3  Ibid.,  iii.  19. 


io6  CHRISTENDOM. 

umbria  founded  his  first  community ;  and  like  his  great 
predecessor  at  Iona  he  chose  for  its  site — for  his  Delos,  his 
Holy  Isle — an  island,  Lindisfarne,  lying  just  off  the  coast, 
nearly  opposite  to  the  old  Bernician  capital,  Bamborough.1 
(Northumbria  was  one  kingdom  under  Oswald  and  Oswiu  ; 
but  these  kings  belonged  to  the  Bernician  house.)  Lindisfarne 
became  in  its  turn  the  parent  of  all  the  other  monasteries  in 
Northumbria,  northward  as  far  as  the  Forth,  southward  as 
far  as  the  Humber  ;  of  Melrose,  of  Coldingham,  of  Hartlepool, 
of  Hexham,  of  Whitby  (Streoneshealch)  ;  of  those  two  linked 
monasteries  of  sacred  memory,  Monkwearmouth  and  Jarrow : 
most  of  these,  like  the  Irish  monasteries,  stnnding  to  look  out 
seaward,  and  listen  to.the  sound  of  the  waves;  almost  all,  too, 
destined,  like  the  Irish  monasteries,  to  fall  among  the  earliest 
victims  to  the  coming  fury  of  the  Vikings. 

Twelve  English  monasteries,  and  in  Scotland  thirteen, 
looked  back  to  Irish  monks  as  their  founders;  but  in  a  remoter 
degree  almost  all  the  religious  communities  of  England  and 
Scotland,  nay,  almost  all  the  Christianity  of  Heptarchic 
England 2  might  be  reckoned  as  the  offspring  of  the  foundation 
at  Iona. 

In  return,  Englishmen  and  Welshmen,  even  Gauls  and 
Franks,  flocked  to  the  Irish  schools.  They  learned  much 
there;  for,  as  has  been  said,  much  learning  was  cherished 
there  which  had  been  well-nigh  lost  in  Central  Europe.  And 
some  things  they  learned  which  could  hardly  be  set  down 
in  the  curriculum  of  any  school,  which  yet  constituted  not  the 
least  important  part  of  the  inheritance  of  Mediaeval  Christianity 
rom  the  Irish  monks. 

For  here  is  a  picture  of  one  of  the  Irish  missionaries  in 

1  Berk,  H.  E.,  iii.  3. 

2  '  Kent  alone  owed  its  Christianity  to  the  Roman  missionaries  ' 
(Rainc,  Preface  to  Lives  of  Archbishops  of  York  (Rolls  Ser.) 


THE  VISION  OF  FURSEY.  107 

England,  which  Beda  has  handed  down  to  us.  It  was  '  when 
Sigebert  governed  the  kingdom  of  the  East  Angles,'  almost  at 
the  time,  that  is,  of  the  fatal  battle  of  Heathfield,  'that  there 
came  out  of  Ireland  a  holy  man  named  Furseus,  a  man 
renowned  both  for  his  words  and  actions,  and  noted  for  his 
singular  virtues ;  desirous  for  the  Lord's  sake  to  live  a  stranger 
in  England.'  This  coming  of  Furseus,  therefore,  preceded  the 
mission  of  Aidan  from  Iona.  In  these  still  happy  East  Anglian 
regions  Fursey  built  for  himself  and  his  companions  a 
monastery,  pleasantly  situated  amid  woods,  and  (for  old 
associations  were  strong  in  him)  '  with  the  sea  not  far  off.' 
There,  soothed  by  the  sound  of  the  familiar  waves,  it  happened 
at  one  time  to  Fursey  to  have  a  vision.  He  fell  into  a  trance, 
and  remained  rigid  from  cock-crow  to  evening,  and  when  he 
awoke  he  gave  an  account  of  what  his  soul  had  seen  while 
away  from  his  body.  He  was  carried  up  by  angels  from  earth 
to  heaven,  he  heard  the  happy  choirs  of  the  blest,  heard  the 
praises  which  they  sang  eternally  in  the  presence  of  the  Lord. 

Ibunt  sancti  de  virtute  in  virtutem, 
Videbitur  Deus  deorum  in  Sion,1 

his  guardian  angels  chanted,  and  the  choir  answered  from 
above. 

Looking  down,  too,  over  the  world  he  saw  the  four  fires — 
the  fire  of  lying,  the  fire  of  greedy  desire,  the  fire  of  discord, 
the  fire  of  impiety — which  burned  at  the  four  corners  of  the 
earth ;  which  each  generation  fed  to  greater  fury,  until  at  last 
the  four  fires  would  unite,  and  the  world  would  be  consumed. 
Fursey  had  to  pass  through  one  of  these  fires,  and  by  the 
power  of  his  angel  went  unscathed ;  save  that  a  devil  who  was 
tormenting  those  in  the  flame  threw  at  him  the  body  of  a 

x  The  Chant,  so  it  happens,  which  the  '  Family  of  Iona '  sang  when 
Columba  visited  Kentigern  at  Whithern  (Candida  Casa) — that  oldest  and 
most  forgotten  among  English  religious  foundations. 


io8  CHRISTENDOM. 

certain  man  whom  Fursey  had  known  in  the  flesh,  and  whose 
clothes  he  had  received  when  he  died.  The  angel  warded 
him  from  real  injury,  but  his  earthly  body  ever  afterwards  bore 
upon  the  mouth  and  cheek  the  marks  of  the  hurts  which  had 
been  inflicted  by  the  touch  of  the  burning  limb  upon  the  soul 
of  the  saint.1 

This  was  the  first  of  many  stories  concerning  another  world 
which,  during  this  and  the  succeeding  centuries,  came  out  of 
Ireland.  There  was  the  story  of  the  voyage  of  St.  Brandan  to 
a  sort  of  Earthly  Paradise,  a  sort  of  Islands  of  the  Blessed,  in 
the  far  west.  The  existence  of  the  islands  of  St.  Brandan 
was  firmly  believed  in  throughout  the  Middle  Ages.2 

It  was  believed — no  flattering  belief — that  Ireland  had  to  it- 
self a  special  opening  to  the  under-world  ;  and  St.  Bridget  in  a 
vision  saw  numberless  souls  descending  by  that  way.  Out  of 
this  belief  grew  the  legend  of  St.  Patrick's  Purgatory,  which 
stands  next  to  the  legend  of  St.  Bran  dan's  voyage  as  one  of 
the  best  known  of  mediaeval  myths  ;  the  legend  told  of  the 
descent  into  purgatory,  by  an  opening  near  Lough  Derg,  of  a 
certain  knight,  Sir  Owayne,  and  of  his  return. 3  All  these 
were  (save  in  the  germ)  later,  mediaeval  legends.  Up  to 
the  time  of  the  Viking  outbreak  the  Vision  of  Fursey  stands 
almost  alone  as  a  legend  which  tells  of  the  future  state. 
Next  to  it,  a  little  later,  comes  the  'Vision  of  Drihthelm,' 
which  likewise  reaches  us  from  Ireland.  It  was  told  to  Beda 
by  one  Haemgils,  a  hermit,  an  Englishman,  but  residing  in 
Ireland.  Fursey's  vision  is,  then,  so  far  as  we  know,  the  first 
of  an  unending  series  which  extends  all  through  the  Middle 
Ages,  and  on  which,  more  than  on  any  other  form  of  intel- 

1  Beda,  H.E.,  iii.  19.  Fursey  went  afterwards  into  France  and  founded 
a  monastery  at  Lagny  ;  and  there  he  died. 

2  T.  Wright,  in  Fercy  Society  Publications,  vol.  xiv. 

3  T.  Wright,  St.  Patrick's  Purgatory. 


OTHER  VISIONS  OF  THE  FUTURE  STATE.     109 

lectual  food,  the  mind  of  mediaeval  Catholicism  was  nourished. 
It  may  seem  to  some  reader  a  strange  assertion  that  there 
ever  was  a  time  in  the  history  of  Christendom  when  mankind 
and  monk-kind  had  not  their  thoughts  constantly  running  upon 
Hell,  and  Purgatory,  and  Heaven.  But  I  believe  the  assertion 
could  be  substantiated.  The  thoughts  of  early  Christendom 
turned  rather  upon  the  Millenium  and  the  Second  Coming  of 
Christ  to  reign  here  in  power,  than  upon  the  fate  of  the  disem- 
bodied soul,  and  on  places  of  reward  and  punishment  after 
death.1  Christendom  had,  of  course,  the  Vision  of  the  Seer  of 
Patmos.  But  that  Apocalypse,  for  all  its  Eastern  richness  of 
apparel,  will,  I  fancy,  always  seem  rather  confused  and  shape- 
less to  Western  eyes.  At  any  rate  it  was  only  now  that  visions 
of  Hell  and  Purgatory  began  to  take  prominence.  They  are 
among  the  peculiar  fruits  of  monasticism,  and  (it  would  be  fair 
to  argue)  of  Irish  monasticism  above  all  other  branches.  The 
belief  in  the  intermediate  place  of  probation  was  only  now,  in 
the  seventh  century,  beginning  to  be  generally  received. 

Fursey ;  Drihthelm  ;  then  there  is  the  vision  of  a  monk  of 
Lake  Constance  (another  region,  by  the  way,  closely  associated 
with  the  labours  of  the  Irish  missionaries)  related  by  Walafrid 
Strabo  ;  there  is  a  French  legend  of  the  Vision  of  Charles  the 
Fat  (881-887),  not  probably  of  the  date  of  Charles  the  Fat; 
the  Vision  of  Tundale  (another  Irishman 2) ;  the  Vision  of 
Alberic  of  Monte  Cassino.  These  two  last  belong  to  the 
twelfth  century,  when  imagination  was  growing  feverish  upon 
the  subject.  At  length  the  long  series,  which  began  in  the 
East  Anglian  monastery,  culminates  in  the  awful  Revelation  of 
the  Florentine.     Who  could  more  fitly  strike  the  first  note  in 

1  Cf.  Michelet,  La  Sorctere  beginning. 

8  He  is  said  to  have  been  the  son  of  a  king  of  Cashel.  Tundale  is  not 
an  Irish  name  and  must  be  a  corruption.  Elsewhere  his  name  appears  as 
Duggall— Dughall  ? 


1 10  CHRISTENDOM. 

this   grand   fugue   than  the   Irish  monks,  who  lived  by  the 
melancholy  ocean,  upon  the  borders  of  the  world  ? 

We   have    seen    of   the    beliefs    of    the    ancient    Germans 
enough  to  know  that  they  had  their  visions  or  their  picture, 
shadowy  enough   in  all    details,    of  the  home    of  the    dead. 
It  comes  to  us  from  Norse  literature.     The  Northmen,  too, 
lived  hard  by  the  borders  of  the  earth,  and  were  likely  to 
concern  themselves  with  what  lay  beyond  it.     In  time,  when 
they   settled  in    the   Western    Islands,   the  Vikings    came    in 
contact  with  the  Celtic  monks  of  Ireland  and  Scotland ;  and 
out  of  this  contact  grew  a  new  vision  of  a  half-heathen  hell  and 
purgatory  ;  a  half-Christian  heaven  ;  a  half-Christian  legend  of 
the  destruction  of  the  world.     It  is  enshrined  in  some  of  the 
most  beautiful  of  early  Northern  verse.    It  will  be  our  business, 
should,  in  some  future  volume,  the  course  of  this  history  reach 
the  proper  period,  to  speak  of  this  great  creation — to  speak  of 
the  Edda  poetry  and  Edda  mythology  as  a  whole — the  swan- 
song  of  Teutonic  heathendom. 

VL 

While  in  the  manner  which  we  have  partly  described  the  Irish 
Church  was  spreading  its  branches  and  its  influence  in  many 
directions  throughout  the  British  Isles,  other  missionaries  from 
i he  same  centre  made  their  way  to  Continental  Europe.  We 
go  back  a  little  in  the  course  of  time.  The  age  of  Sturm  und 
Drang  was  not  long  over,  but  the  fate  of  the  Western  Empire 
was  sealed.  So  complete  was  the  prostration  of  Rome  that 
the  Teutonic  nations  almost  immediately  began  to  turn  their 
arms  against  one  another.  It  was  only  at  this  stage  that  the 
differences  between  Christians  and  heathens  came  into  relief, 
and  that  a  contest  of  races  changed  gradually  into  a  contest 
of  creeds.     By  the  middle  of  the  sixth  century  all  the  intrusive 


COLUMBAN  AND  GALL.  in 

barbarians,  except  the  English,  had  become  Christians ;  and 
the  reign  of  heathendom  on  the  Continent  was  limited  to  the 
not-Rome  of  ancient  days,  the  country  beyond  the  Rhine. 
The  Gaulish  Church  claimed  to  have  conquered  its  conquerors. 
But  after  the  first  elan  of  Catholic  enthusiasm,  which  animated 
Clodowig  and  his  immediate  successors,  the  Frankish  nation 
had  sunk  back  to  semi-heathenism,  and  the  Church  of  Gaul 
into  deep  corruption.  Columbanus  came  from  Iona  to  reform 
the  Church  and  the  monasticism  of  Gaul,  and  to  beard  the 
fierce  half-heathen  princes  of  the  Merovingian  House.  He  is 
an  impressive  figure,  fierce,  intolerant,  rash,  indomitable.1 

One  while  he  passed  beyond  the  boundaries  of  Christendom, 
and,  in  company  with  a  brother  missionary,  the  famous  St.  Gall, 
came  to  that  very  place  of  which  Ammian  has  left  us  a  little 
picture — Brigantia  (Bregenz),  surrounded  by  its  dark  and 
swampy  ways,  whither  '  the  Romans,  with  their  customary 
good  sense,  have  made  a  road.'  Lake  Constance,  that  region 
of  mountain  and  lake,  was  for  some  time  the  scene  of  the 
labours  of  the  two  missionaries.  They  preached  to  all  who 
would  hear,  and  were  not  afraid  to  court  hostility  by  felling 
sacred  trees  and  groves.  They  supported  themselves  by  fishing. 
One  night  as  Gall  was  watching  his  nets  he  heard  the  Spirit  of 
the  Lake  calling  to  the  Spirit  of  the  Alps  to  come  and  help 
him  to  drive  away  these  apostles  of  a  foreign  creed.  By  which 
legend  we  see  that  whatever  else  these  preachers  left  behind, 
they  brought  their  fervid  Irish  imagination  with  them. 

Afterwards  Columban  desired  to  pass  into  Italy,  but  Gall  to 
continue  his  work  among  the  Helvetians.  The  contention  was 
so  sharp  between  them  that  Columban  departed,  leaving  his 
curse  upon  Gallen  and  his  work — a  fruitless  curse,  for  the  other 
remained  among  the  hills  and  founded  the  monastery  which 

1  Vita  S.  Columbani  Ord.  S.  Bened.,  ii.  27.  Cf.  Michelet,  Hist,  de 
France )  ii.  2. 


ii2  CHRISTENDOM. 

bears  his  name,  second  in  importance  to  scarcely  any  religious 
house  in  the  Middle  Ages.  Columban,  as  we  know,  went  and 
founded  Bobbio,  in  Lombardy  :  St.  Gallen  and  Bobbio  were 
places  specially  favoured  in  after-years  by  the  German  Carling 
house. 

The  labours  of  the  Irish  missionaries  in  heathen  lands  were 
directed  chiefly *  to  the  countries  of  the  Upper  Rhine  and 
Upper  Danube,  and  to  Switzerland.  Wherever  they  came 
they  founded  monasteries,  which  lay  like  Roman  camps 
entrenched  in  a  foreign  country.  In  all  seven  monasteries  in 
France,  seventeen  in  Alsace  and  Lorraine,  fifteen  in  Switzer- 
land and  in  the  parts  east  of  the  Rhine,  sixteen  in  Bavaria, 
counted  Irish  monks  as  their  founders.2  And  for  the  whole 
body  of  Celtic  missionaries  who  worked  and  died  in  these 
lands  who  can  count  them  ?  One  hundred  and  fifty  are  com- 
memorated in  the  dedications  of  Churches,  or  as  the  patrons  of 
towns  and  villages — one  hundred  and  fifty,  of  whom  thirty-six 
were  martyrs :  though  little  enough  is  now  remembered  of  their 
life  and  works. 

Caught  by  the  same  enthusiasm,  the  English  monks  began 
presently  to  tread  in  the  footsteps  of  the  Irish,  and  to  go 
out  and  preach  among  the  heathen  Germans  ;  and  as  nearer 
allies  in  race  and  language  their  efforts  might  be  expected  to 
be  crowned  with  even  greater  success.  Conversions  pro<  eeded 
apace  among  the  Germans  of  Upper  Germany  before  the 
English  missionary  era  began  ;  so  that  the  labours  of  these  last 
lay  to  a  great  extent  among  the  people  of  the  Lower  Rhine  and 
beyond  it,  with  the  Frisians  of  the  Low  Countries,  the  Saxons 
between  the  Rhine  and  the  Elbe.  The  English,  though  in  the 
days  of  the  Folk-wanderings  they  had  not  gone  so  far  afield 
as  some  of  their  brother  Teutons,   were  not  less   inveterate 

1  But  far  from  exclusively.  *  Montalembert,  Moines  d?  Occident. 


THE  SCOTTISH  CHURCH  AND  ROME.  113 

wanderers  than  the  Scotch  and  Irish  of  this  era,  or  than  they 
have  remained  ever  since.  The  love  of  pilgriming  to  Rome 
became  a  veritable  contagion  among  the  English  princes  and 
nobles  at  the  end  of  the  seventh  and  the  beginning  of  the 
eighth  centuries. 

It  was,  we  have  said,  reckoned  a  happy  thing  for  Catholicism 
that  the  conversion  of  the  Franks  and  English  came  so  late. 
They  escaped  the  fatal  heresy  of  the  Arians,  and  they  were  re 
born  into  the  Christian  community  at  a  time  when  more  order 
was  coming  into  it ;  when  monasticism  from  being  an  external, 
independent,  almost  republican  influence,  was  being  absorbed 
into  the  regular  constitution  of  the  Church ;  and  when  the 
central  of  power  in  the  West — the  See  of  Rome — was  from  day 
to  day  assuming  a  position  more  unchallenged.  As  the  Franks 
made  themselves  the  champions  of  the  Catholic  dogma  in 
Western  Europe,  so  were  the  English  the  champions  and  the 
exponents  of  a  peculiar  devotion  to  the  Holy  See.  This  was 
symbolized  by  the  love  of  pilgriming  to  Rome  which  marked 
the  laity  ; x  and  it  was  proclaimed  in  a  still  more  emphatic  and 
important  way  by  some  of  the  saints  and  confessors  of  the 
English  Church.  It  produced  a  rift  between  the  English  and 
the  Irish  Churches,  and  more  than  anything  else  (before  the 
coming  of  the  Vikings)  checked  the  influence  of  the  latter  on 
Christendom  at  large. 

As  in  the  da)  s  of  the  first  barbarian  invasions  the  heat  of  the 
Trinitarian  controversy  threw  into  the  shade  the  history  of  the 
earliest  encounters  between  Christianity  and  Heathenism,  so 
in  this  age  the  achievements  of  the  Irish  missionaries  in  the 
region  of  German  Germany  were  obscured  by  the  dispute 
which  arose  over  the  validity  of  their  mission.     The  dispute 

1  The  following  are  the  names  of  some  Heptarchic  kings  who  made 
pilgrimages  to  Rome  : — Wessex — Ine  and  Ceadwalla  ;  Essex— Offa  I.  and 
Sihtric  ;  Mercia — Coenred. 


1 14  CHRISTENDOM. 

seems  in  our  eyes  contemptible  enough.  It  turned  on  certain 
questions  of  the  form  of  the  tonsure  to  be  used  by  monks, 
and  on  the  proper  time  (in  a  certain  eventuality)  for  observing 
Easter.  In  substance  the  dispute  was  really  this :  Pope 
Gregory  the  Great,  the  first  tonsured  Pope,  had  come  from 
the  monastery  of  Monte  Cassino.  He  and  his  successors, 
most  of  whom  were  tonsured  likewise,  supported  the  rule  of 
St.  Benedict,  as  the  only  orthodox  rule  for  monasticism.  The 
'tonsure  of  St.  Peter,'  as  it  was  called,  was  the  symbol  of 
conformity  to  that  rule  ;  and  the  Irish  Church  rejected  rule 
and  tonsure  (for  much  the  same  reason  that  made  the  Goths 
reject  the  formula  of  the  Council  of  Nice)  because  their 
monachism  had  an  earlier  pedigree,  and  traced  its  descent 
directly  from  the  monachism  of  Africa.  In  England  the  two 
streams  met — Augustine  and  Paulinus  had  journeyed  from  the 
South,  despatched  by  that  very  Gregory  who  was  the  originator 
of  all  this  controversy  ;  Aidan  and  his  disciples  drew  their 
inspiration  from  Iona.  We  may  guess  that  the  English  were 
not  loath  to  proclaim  their  independence  of  their  Celtic  god- 
fathers ;  their  devotion  to  the  popes  may  have  been  stimu- 
lated by  their  pride  of  race.  The  question  was  decided  for 
Northumbria  at  the  famous  synod  of  Whitby 
(Streoneshealch),  when  the  use  of  Iona  was  for- 
mally repudiated  by  the  English  ecclesiastics. 

The  chief  figure  in  this  revolution  — for  it  may  be  called  a 
revolution — is  that  of  St.  Wilfred  (WilfriS),  the  Archbishop  of 
York,  a  man,  as  appears,  of  proud  and  passionate  character,1 
but  of  eminent  and  commanding  virtues,  influenced,  too,  by 
a  special   devotion  to  the  Holy  See.2     He   carried  this  pre- 

1  Cf  Eddias,  Vita  Wilfrithiep.  in  Raine,  Hist,  of  Arbps.  of  York,  i.  1-103 
(Rolls  Ser.),  c.  14,  16.  Wilfred  was  the  greatest  name'  upon  the  Roman 
side  at  the  synod,  Colman  and  Hilda  on  the  Scottish. 

2  Eddius,  /.  c. 


WILFRED.  115 

possession  to  the  extent  of  embroiling  himself  not  only  with 
the  Scottish  ecclesiastics  in  Northumbria,  not  only  with  his 
own  princes,  but  with  the  great  Theodore,  the  Archbishop  of 
Canterbury.  Of  these  disputes,  of  Wilfred's  frequent  appeals 
to  the  Pope  and  his  councils,  even  of  the  efforts  which  he 
made  to  destroy  the  Scottish  Church  in  Northumbria,  we  have 
not  to  speak  in  detail.  But  it  concerns  us  to  step  aside  for  a 
moment  to  watch  his  mission  into  Sussex,  that  is  to  say  into 
the  last  considerable  stronghold  of  heathenism  in  England.1 
The  story  which  Beda 2  tells  us  of  the  great  famine  which 
raged  among  the  South  Saxons  at  the  time  when  Wilfred 
began  his  mission,  the  tragic  picture  which  he  draws  of  whole 
companies  of  men  and  women  impelled  by  the  misery  of 
hunger  and  going  hand  in  hand  to  some  cliff's  edge  and  casting 
themselves  thence  into  the  sea,  of  Wilfred  teaching  the  people 
how  to  catch  fish  by  nets  and  so  relieve  their  distress,  secures 
that  the  history  of  this  mission  of  St.  Wilfred  shall  remain 
fixed  in  our  memory.3 

The  Christianization  of  Sussex  and  of  the  Isle  of  Wight  which 
marks  the  closing  years  of  the  seventh  century,  completes  the 
history  of  the  conversion  of  the  intrusive  heathens,  those  who 
had  occupied  lands  which  were  once  part  of  the  Roman  Empire 
and  part  of  ancient  Christendom.  The  conversion  of  heathen 
Germany — or  German  Germany  we  have  called  it — had,  we 
know,  begun  long  before  this  date.  But  to  what  extent  it  had 
proceeded  is  obscure  to  us.  Could  we  even  know  exactly 
how  far  the  power  of  the  Franks  spread  east  of  the  Rhine  it 
would  be  something.  The  first  victory  of  the  Franks  over  the 
Alamanni  (Ziilpich,  496)  led,  as  we  saw,  to  that  event  of  world- 

1  The  Isle  of  Wight  alone  was  converted  later.  a  Hist.  Ec,  iv.  13. 

3  The  story  must  be  more  or  less  apocryphal.  It  is  not  possible  that 
people  so  far  advanced  in  civilization  should  be  ignorant  of  the  prehistoric 
art  of  making  nets. 


n  6  CHRISTENDOM. 

wide  import,  the  conversion  of  Chlodowig.  The  later  victories 
of  the  Franks  over  the  Thiiringians,  Frisians,  Bavarians  must, 
by  another  process,  have  in  themselves  led  to  the  partial  con- 
version of  these  people.1  But  even  these  conquests  we  cannot 
accurately  date.  When  the  Bavarians  first  appear  before  us 
by  name,  they  appear  as  already  to  some  extent  the 
subjects  of  the  Franks.  Still,  the  Irish  missionaries  found 
much  to  do  among  them.  With  the  northern  German  races 
beyond  the  Rhine  it  was  probably  the  same.  Both  Frisians 
and  Thiiringians  were  already  partly  converted.  But  heathen- 
ism was  still  strong  among  them.  It  was  (we  have  said)  to 
these  northern  Germans  that  the  English  missionaries  chiefly 
turned. 

VII. 

Wilfred  himself  began  the  work.  The  origin  of  these  his 
labours  recalls  the  history  of  Columba ;  he  was  driven  from 
his  chosen  scene  of  work,  or  left  it  self-exiled,  and  found  for 
a  time  a  new  field  among  the  heathens  of  Frisia.     It  was  in 

a.d.   678  that  he    first   landed    in    these   regions. 

He  found  a  king  of  Frisia,  Andgisl,  not  un- 
friendly, and  during  the  short  period  of  his  mission  he 
converted  and  baptized,  his  biographer  tells  us,  many 
thousands.  Wilfred  can  hardly  be  numbered  among  the 
great  English  missionaries  in  heathen  Germany;  not  at  least 
for  what  he  himself  accomplished ;  but  he  initiated  much. 
For  a  pupil  of  his  at  Ripon   '  was  the  famous  Willibrord ' 2 

who   spent  more  than  an  average  lifetime  among 

the  Frisians  ;  he  went  to  them  first  in  a.d.  692,  and 
died  among  them  at  a  great  age  as  the  first  bishop  of  Utrecht 

1  That  it  was  only  partial  we  know  well  enough  from  the  history  of 
Boniface's  mission,  Vita  (Pertz,  ii.  346).     Cf.  Jaffe,  Mon.  Mogunt. 

2  Eddius,  c.  26. 


BONIFACE.  n7 

in  A.D.  739.     During  the  years  of  his  mission  he  once  over 
stepped  the  border  and  preached  in  Denmark.1 

The  next  in  succession  is  a  still  more  celebrated  name. 
Winfred,2  or,  as  he  was  afterwards  called,  Boniface,  was 
born  in  a  region  remote  from  the  sphere  of  the  Northumbrian 
Scottish  Church,  in  the  half-Welsh  Devonshire,  and  under  the 
rule  of  the  West  Saxon  kings.  Wessex,  of  course,  like  all  the 
rest  of  the  Heptarchic  kingdoms,  save  Kent,  owed  its  Chris- 
tianity to  Northumbria,  and  therefore  in  the  second  degree  to 
Iona.  It  had  not  been  Christian  half  a  century  when  Boniface 
was  born.  But  it  made  up  in  zeal  for  the  lateness  of  its 
conversion  \  that  is  if  we  may  take  as  a  sign  of  zeal  the 
eagerness  of  its  kings  to  make  pilgrimages  to  Rome.  The 
two  kings  under  whom  Boniface  lived  his  adult  years  in 
England,  Ceadwalla  and  Ine,  both  died  in  Rome.  Boniface 
may  have  been  prepared  by  the  popular  feeling  in  Wessex  tor 
the  special  devotion  to  the  Papal  See  which  marked  all  his 
missionary  work  abroad,  and  which  was  as  important  an 
element  in  it,  almost,  as  his  success  in  the  conversion  of  the 
heathen. 

He,  like  his  two  predecessors  above  spoken  of,  turned  his 
first  steps  to  Frisia.  But  he  found  that  country  in  the  throes  of 
a  counter-revolution.  The  Andgisl  of  Wilfred's  time  had  been 
succeeded  by  Radbod,  one  of  those  rare  champions  of  heathen- 
dom whom  we  encounter  in  the  course  of  this  history,  who 
had  the  courage  of  his  belief  in  the  creed  of  his  forefathers. 
Athanaric,  the  Goth,  is  one  such ;  the  fierce  Penda  is  another. 
Radbod  came,  indeed,  near  to  accepting  baptism  :  but  he  be- 
thought himself  of  asking,  if  it  were  true  what  the  priests  said 

1  Alcuini,  Vita  S.   Willib.  in  Migne,  t.  101. 

2  Vita  S.  Bouifacii  {\Wi\iba\d  Acta  SS.  June  5  Benedict.  Ssec.  viii.  ;  Pertz, 
vol.  ii.).  There  is  an  excellent  sketch  of  the  life  of  Boniface  by  Mr.  E. 
Maunde  Thompson  in  the  Die.  Nat.  Biog. 


n8  CHRISTENDOM. 

that  by  baptism  alone  could  men  hope  for  salvation,  where, 
in  that  case,  were  his  unbaptized  forefathers;  and  his  instructor 
had  the  honesty  to  confess  that,  according  to  his  creed,  they 
must  be  burning  in  hell.  '  Then,'  said  the  Frisian  prince,  '  I 
will  rather  live  there  with  my  ancestors  than  go  to  heaven  with 
a  parcel  of  beggars.'  All  the  old  Teuton  pride  of  race  spoke  in 
that  answer.  And  now  Radbod  had  turned  violently  against 
the  Christians,  driven  them  forth,  burnt  their  churches,  and 
rebuilt  the  heathen  temples.  He  was  at  war,  too,  with  Pippin 
and  the  Franks.1 

a  ™  tiq  wo  ^n  Hesse  and  Thiiringia,  whither  Boniface  next 
turned,  his  labours  lay  partly  in  converting  the 
heathen  Germans,  partly  in  combating  the  work  of  earlier 
'schismatic'  preachers  in  these  lands;  by  which  phrase  we 
are  to  understand  the  Irish  missionaries  who  had  preceded 
him.  Thus  the  stream  of  English  proselytism  finally  left 
the  old  channel,  and  for  the  rest  of  Boniface's  life  one-half 
of  his  activity  was  employed  in  reforming  the  semi-Christian 
communities  (so  he  considered  them)  which  he  found  in 
Germany,  and  in  bringing  them  into  obedience  to  the 
Holy  See.2  It  was  all  in  keeping  with  this  principle  that, 
when  in  a.d.  722  (he  was  back  again  in  PYisia  at  this 
time),  Willibrord  would  have  consecrated  him  bishop  and 
named  him  as  his  successor  at  Utrecht,  he  refused,  on  the 
ground  that  he  could  not  receive  consecration  without  the 
sanction  of  the  Pope.  He  then  went  to  Rome,  summoned 
thither  by  Pope  Gregory  II.  After  he  had  remained  in  Rome 
a  year,  and  had  satisfied  the  Pope  of  his  orthodoxy,  he  was 
made  a  bishop ;  he  on  his  side  pledging  himself  in  writing  to 
do   nothing  in  disobedience  to   the   Holy    Father.      Such  a 

1  Radbod  died  A.D.  719. 

2  Cf.  Jaffe,  Mon  Mogunt.  passim,  especially  Nos.  49-52,  and  Vita  Bonif. 
29,  &c.  (Pertz,  ii.  3,  4,  6.) 


RESULT  OF  HIS  LABOURS.  II9 

consecration  on  such  terms  was  a  novelty,  and  it  forms  an 
epoch  in  the  history  of  the  Christian  Church  north  of  the 
Alps.  In  a.d.  732,  after  a  second  residence  in  Rome,  Boni- 
face was  made  an  archbishop  by  Gregory  III.,  and  endowed 
with  the  primacy  of  Germany. 

Winfred  travelled  back  through  Bavaria,  one  of  the  chief 
scenes  of  labour  for  his  Irish  predecessors,  and  occupied 
himself  in  reforming  the  Bavarian  Church  in  the  sense  that  I 
have  indicated.1  In  Hesse  he  found  much  pure  heathenism, 
and  there  he  did  what  Columban  and  Gall  had  nearly  called 
down  popular  vengeance  by  doing,  set  himself  to  destroy 
the  shrines  of  the  ancient  faith.  History  records  a  scene  in 
which  the  saint  took  axe  in  hand  to  fell  a  certain  Bet.  A.D.  725 
sacred  oak  at  Geissmar,  near  Frizlar.2  At  the  and  AD-  731, 
first  few  strokes  of  the  axe,  says  the  legend,  the  tree  fell  and 
broke  into  four  pieces. 3  The  heathens  were  overawed  by  the 
miracle,  and  the  Christians  assisted  the  apostle  to  build  a 
church  to  St.  Peter  upon  the  site — a  single  picture  which  our 
memory  can  retain  out  of  Boniface's  incessant  labours. 

A  little  further   north   Boniface  founded  Fulda 

A  D   744 

monastery,  in  a.d.  744.  In  the  deep  forest  shades 
(the  Bucinian  forest)  the  monks'  chapel  bell  might  be  heard 
calling  morning,  noon,  and  evening,  to  prayers,  where  late, 
maybe,  the  cries  of  human  victims  had  startled  the  echoes. 
Here  Boniface's  bones  were  afterwards  laid,  and  here  they 
worked  miracles.  Greater  were  the  miracles  he  worked  while 
living.     The  results  of  his  labours  are  immeasureable. 

Boniface   found   in    Germany   a  Christianity  of   a   sort ;  a 
nebulous  influence  of  the  spiritual  Irish  kind  ;  he  left  a  Church 

1  He  was  again  engaged  in  the  same  work  in  A.D.  739. 

2  A  place  (if  we  may  judge  by  the  name)  sacred  for  a  miraculous  fount  as 
well  as  for  a  holy  tree.      Cf.  Forstemann,  s.  v.  Geissmar. 

3  Vita  Bonif.  (Wilibald),  vi.  22. 


120  CHRISTENDOM. 

in  Germany,  ordered,  orthodox,  devoted  to  the  Holy  See.  We 
have  not  to  discuss  which  kind  of  conversion  might  have 
eventually  proved  the  most  wholesome.  For  to  discuss  any 
other  than  the  actual  event,  we  should  have  to  imagine 
mediaeval  Catholicism  unformed — and  that  would  be  to  sup- 
pose the  great  era  of  mediaeval  history  a  blank  page  on  which 
we  might  write  an  imaginary  history  to  suit  our  pleasure.  It 
may  be  questioned  whether  any  one  person  contributed  so 
much  to  the  creation  of  mediaeval  Catholicism  as  did  this 
wonderful  man. 

In  the  three  great  personalities,  Wilfred,  Willibrord,  and 
Winfred  or  Boniface,  we  may  watch  how  the  English 
Church  parts  company  with  the  Irish,  and  continues  hence- 
forward to  trace  out  a  new  channel  for  itself.  In  a.d.  567 
began,  as  we  saw,  the  eastward  flow  of  the  wave  of  mis- 
sionary labour.  At  the  synod  of  Whitby  (a.d.  664)  occurred 
the  first  marked  division  between  the  Churches,  whereby 
the  Irish  stream  of  influence  was,  so  to  say,  dammed  up 
on  the  English  side,  and  a  new  reservoir  was  formed.  Wilfred, 
consistently  enough,  refused  to  receive  consecration  at  the 
hands  of  the  Northumbrian  bishops,  and  obtained  it  from 
the  Bishop  of  Lyons.  He  inaugurated  the  English  missionary 
work  by  his  own  labours  in  a.d.  678,  and  still  more  by  training 
up  Willibrord  for  his  great  work  in  Frisia — Willibrord  who,  it 
is  well  for  us  to  remember,  once  passed  the  Frisian  border  and 
preached  in  Denmark,  the  first  missionary  in  any  Scandinavian 
land.  Last  came  Boniface,  a.d.  716,  whose  nolo  episcopari  at 
the  hands  of  Willibrord,  only  emphazised  the  lesson  which 
Wilfred  sought  to  teach  by  refusing  Scottish  consecration :  such 
great  work  as  he  was  engaged  upon  must  not  alone  be  free 
from  the  taint  of  schism,  it  must  receive  its  inspiration  direct 
from  the  Holy  See. 


CHAPTER  IV. 
THE    FIRST    CONTESTS. 

I. 

Of  those  two  Christian  forces  with  which  we  have  just  been 
concerned,  the  Irish  missionaries  and  the  English  missionaries 
in  Europe,  the  former  seems  especially  associated  with  the  first 
Frankish  dynasty,  the  Merovings,  the  latter  with  the  second, 
the  house  of  Heristal.  Columba's  mission  belongs  to  the 
days  of  Fredegond  and  Brunehild,  the  darkest  period  of  the 
Meroving  annals.  Boniface  could  never  have  achieved  what 
he  did  without  the  assistance  of  Charles  the  Hammer.  He 
came  to  the  Frank  mayor  specially  recommended  by  Pope 
Gregory.  He  is  said  to  have  crowned  Pippin  the  Short,  at 
Soissons,  in  751,1  as  the  representative  of  Pope  Zachary,  four 
years  before  Boniface's  own  death. 

The  difference  between  the  relationships  of  the  Irish  mission- 
aries and  the  English  to  the  two  Frankish  houses  is,  however, 
marked  enough.  Columba  arraigned  the  dissolute  Merovingian 
kings  more  fiercely  than  he  braved  the  heathen  Germans  on 
Lake  Constance :  Boniface,  in  his  great  work  of  establishing 
not  Christianity  only  but  an  ordered  Church,  leaned  constantly 

1  See  Sickel,  Forsck.  z.  deut.  G.,  iv.  445,  for  this  date. 


122  FIRST  CONTESTS. 

upon  the  support  of  the  secular  arm;  the  close  alliance  of 
Church  and  State  was  inaugurated  by  him.1 

Meantime  the  State  had  its  own  era  of  contests  with 
heathendom.  From  the  very  beginning  we  see  the  arms  of 
the  Franks  turned  against  their  brother  Germans — against 
Germans  (Christians)  upon  this  side  of  the  Rhine,  Burgundians 
and  Visigoths  ;  against  Germans  (heathens  or  half-heathens) 
upon  the  farther  side  of  the  river,  Bavarians,  Alamannians, 
Thuringians,  Frisians  :  only,  as  we  have  said  before,  the  details 
of  the  latter  series  of  contests  are  mostly  lost  to  us.  We  can- 
not quite  tell  how  far  they  are  to  be  looked  upon  as  contests 
between  heathendom  and  Christendom.  We  may  be  sure  that 
the  main  object  of  them  was  not  the  spread  of  Christianity,  but 
the  expansion  of  the  Frankish  empire.  Ere  we  come  to  a  war, 
undertaken  with  the  distinct  object  of  extending  the  realm  of 
Christ — a  war  which  we  may  really  designate  the  first  Crusade 
the  world  ever  knew — we  must  wait  till  we  come  to  the  Saxon 
War  of  Charlemagne. 

But  before  we  do  this  we  may  pause  a  moment  and  listen  to 

the  first  faint  note  of  another,   a  very  different    martial  air, 

which  comes  wafted  to  us  down  the  stream  of  time — that  air 

which,   in  the  great  orchestra  of  history,  will  for  some  time 

rise  continually  higher  and  higher,  will  mingle  with  and,  for  a 

little    while,    overpower   whatever   music    comes    from   either 

Christian  Church  or  Christian  State. 

Far  back  in  the  Meroving  era,  in  the  reign  of 
A.D.  circ.  515.  m,        ,     .  .    „°   .  ,  •         ,     • 

Theodonc,    the    son    of  Clovis,   who   reigned   in 

Austrasia,  and  held  the   country  of  the  Rhine  mouth  as  far 

as   to   the    Meuse,   there    came    up    the    last-named    river   a 

Scandinavian    pirate    fleet,    the    forerunner    of    all    the    later 

Viking  fleets.     The  commander  of  it  was  Hugleik  (Chochi- 

1  Cf.  Jaffe,  Mon.  Mogiml,  52. 


HYGELAC.  123 

laicus,  Gregory  of  Tours  calls  him  :).  Theodoric  com- 
manded his  son,  Theodebert.  to  march  up  and  intercept  the 
pirates.  Hugleik  had  just  finished  his  attack,  and  was  super- 
intending the  re-embarkation  of  his  men,  when  the  Frank  army 
fell  upon  him,  and  in  the  hand-moot  which  ensued  Hugleik 
fell — handgemdt  ]?aer  mon  Hygelae  sloh,  as  our  English  poem, 
Beowulf,  has  it — 

Nor  was  that  the  least 
Of  hand-to-hand  fights  where  they  Hygelae  slewj 
When  the  Geat  King  in  war-wagers 
The  folk's  good  lord  on  the  Frisian  strand,2 
Hrethels  descendant,  with  blood  drunken  died.3 

It  was  a  spasmodic  effort,  a  remote  forewarning  of  future 
events,  without  immediate  result  of  any  kind ;  unless  we  count 
as  result  this  echo  in  verse  sounding  from  the  distant  past  as 
over  a  wide  water. 

Hugleik  becomes  in  the  English  poem  Hygelae.  His  in- 
terest for  us  lies  in  the  slight  picture  of  him  drawn  in 
Beowulf.  He  was  the  elder  brother  of  the  hero  of  the  poem  ; 
and  one  picture  which  we  get  in  it  is  of  Hygelae  sitting  in  his 
palace  close  by  the  sea-wall — in  South  Sweden  was  it,  or  in 
Zealand  ?  4 — and  listening  to  Beowulf's  history  of  his  deeds 
among  the  'Ring  Danes.'  Perhaps  that  story  fared  him  to  try 
his  own  fortunes  even  farther  afield. 

1  Greg.  Tur.,  Hist.  Fr.,  iii.  3  (Bouquet  ii.  187).  Chlochilaic  for  Hugleik, 
Anglicised  into  Hygelae,  see  Munch  Norske  Folks  Historie,  I.  i.  52  (Ed. 
1852),  and  vSaxo  Gram.  Hist.  Dan. 

2  Lit.  '  lands.' 

3  No  J>aet  leesest  waes 
Handgemota,  Jjaer  mon  Hygelae  sloh, 
Syo^5an  Geata  cyning  gufte-raesum, 
Freawine  folces  Freslondum  on, 
Hre<5els  eafora  hioro  dryncum  svvealt. 

Beowulf,  1.  2354-8  (Grein). 
4  For  the  question  is  disputed. 


124  FIRS'l  CONTESTS, 

Such  an  awakening  of  the  Viking  spirit  was  like  the  fabulous 
awakening  of  Barbarossa,  while  he  slept  under  the  palace  at 
Kaiserslautern.  '  Do  the  ravens  still  fly  round  the  hill  ?  .  .  . 
Then  must  I  sleep  another  hundred  years.'  For  almost  three 
centuries  more  the  curtain  descends  upon  the  Baltic  nations. 
They  did,  it  may  be,  valiant  deeds,  and  developed  a  race  of 
heroes.  They  went  down  to  Orcus,  and  long  night  oppressed 
them.  They  went  not,  indeed,  unsung;  but  the  ballads  which 
told  their  history  have  not  survived  to  our  day,  save  in  the  case 
of  the  few  heroes  of  the  poem  Beowulf. 

The  travelling  of  this  poem,  or  the  germ  of  it,  across  the 
North  Sea,  not  later  probably  than  the  year  a.d.  700,  must  be 
taken  to  argue  some  intercourse  between  the  opposite  shores 
of  the  German  Ocean.  Englishmen  had  already  heard  of  the 
Danes;  for  once  the  voice  of  Willibrord  had  broken  the  silence 
of  the  Danish  forests.  We  see  from  the  poem  that  they  had 
heard,  too,  of  a  farther  land  than  Jutland,  the  land  of  the 
Geatas  or  Goths,  from  which  one  must  pass  over  the  swan 
road  (the  sea)  to  reach  Denmark.  This  may  have  been  Zea- 
land. It  may  have  been  Gauthiod,  Gothland,  in  the  southern 
elbow  of  Scandinavia. 

Save  for  this  the  Baltic  had  sunk  out  of  sight  of  the  historic 
world  much  as  Britain  had  done  in  the  days  of  Procopius. 
Charles  the  Great,  in  the  course  of  his  Saxon  wars,  had  the 
merit  of  rediscovering  that  sea — for  good  or  evil. 

It  is  in  the  Saxon  wars  of  Charlemagne  that  begins  a  new 
era  in  the  relationships  of  Christendom  and  Heathendom.  Up 
till  now  the  efforts  of  Christianity  among  the  outer  heathens 
had  been,  chiefly  at  any  rate,  of  a  missionary  kind,  by  persua- 
sion not  by  force.  Pippin  the  Short  had  used  something  more 
than  persuasion  in  the  case  of  the  Frisian  king,  Radbod. 

Missionaries  had  gone  to  the  Saxons,  and  they  had  been 


CHARLEMAGNE'S  SAXON  WAR,  125 

allowed  to  kill  and  torture  them  ;  albeit  the  Saxons  had  be- 
come, in  name  at  least,  the  tributaries  of  the  Franks.  We  see 
two  instances  in  the  case  of  the  two  Hewalds  x  Other  martyr- 
doms followed.  Public  opinion  as  well  as  his  private  ambition 
called  on  Charles  to  stretch  out  his  arm  and  teach  these  turbu- 
lent neighbours  the  might  of  the  new  empire  which  had  grown 
up  by  their  side.2 

But  let  it  not  be  thought  that  in  its  contest  with  heathendom 
— which  is,  in  a  sense,  the  renewal  of  the  contest  between 
Rome  and  not-Rome — the  Empire  of  the  Franks  is  the  heir 
of  the  Empire  of  the  Roman  Caesars.  That  heir  was  the  whole 
of  western  Christendom,  neither  more  nor  less.  We  cannot  for 
those  days  reckon  by  political  divisions,  nor  consider  the  State 
as  a  thing  separate  from  the  Church.  Even  in  ancient  Rome 
the  two  were  not  divided.  The  Emperors  had  in  their  best 
days  wielded  more  than  a  physical  power.  They  were  Popes 3 
as  well  as  Emperors.  Their  rule  was  binding  upon  the  wills 
and  consciences  of  men  ;  even  in  their  lifetime  they  were  half- 
divine.  Consider  the  significance  of  the  altar  which  Tiberius  set 
up  Divo  Augusto  at  Lyons.  Round  that  altar  was  concentrated 
the  nationality  of  Gaul;  and  in  virtue  of  it  the  country  grew 
into  a  political  unity  such  as  it  had  never  constituted  before. 
Before  that  altar  the  Roman  of  the  '  Province,'  and  the  native 
of  northern  Gaul,  could  unite  in  a  common  faith.  The  latter 
did  not  abandon  his  adoration  of  streams,  or  oaks,  or  of  Bormo 
or  Grannus  ;  his  ancestral  belief  was  no  obstacle  to  his  offering 
sacrifice,  or  paying  sincere  vows  to  the  spirit  of  the  Divin 
Augustus. 

But  in  Christendom,  which  was  before  all  else  a  theocracy, 

1  Beda,  H.  E.,  v.  10. 

2  Cf.  Einhard,  Vita  Caroli  Imp.,  c.  7  (Pertz,  ii.  446). 

3  Pontifices  Maximi.  This  title  had  by  the  time  of  Charlemagne  been 
appropriated  by  the  Popes  ;  it  was,  in  fact,  the  only  official  title  which 
distinguished  them  from  other  bishops. 


i26  FIRST  CONTESTS. 

the  temporal  ruler  claimed  no  worship,  only  such  honour  as 
belonged  to  one  appointed  by  Heaven.  Christ  was  now  the 
fiaoCkevQ  (3a(n\eujvi  the  setter-up  and  puller-down  of  kings.  All 
parts  of  Western  Christendom  acknowledged  one  creed,  one 
moral  law,  independent  of  the  caprice  of  monarchs  ;  and  by 
this  unify  of  worship  and  belief  all  Christian  Europe  was 
indissolubly  bound  together.  This  moral  and  religious  union 
was  supplemented  too  by  an  intellectual  one  ;  for  almost  all 
the  literature  of  those  days  was  theological,  and  ail  the  natives 
of  Western  Christendom  had  the  same  literature  in  this  kind. 
They  had  finally  a  common  literary  language — Latin.  It  was 
the  language,  not  of  priests  and  monks  alone,  but  of  almost 
all  public  documents  and  public  transactions.  The  compilers 
of  our  chronicle  (following  Beda)  set  out  by  enumerating  the 
various  laneuases  which  had  their  home  in  the  island  of 
Britain  in  the  days  of  which  they  write.  These  languages 
are  the  English,  the  British,  the  Scottish,  the  Pictish,  and  the 
'  Book-Latin.' x  And  this  '  Book-Latin  '  would  have  its  place 
in  a  summary  of  the  different  languages  in  use  in  any  state 
of  Western  Europe  during  these  days.  It  was  now,  in  the 
eighth  century,  beginning  to  be  sharply  distinguished  from  the 
colloquial  Latin — the  lingua  rustica  of  the  so-called  Latin 
races. 

No  longer,  then,  materially,  by  means  of  a  single  political 
system,  nor  by  visible  armies  tramping,  and  messengers  speed- 
ing, along  the  Roman  roads,  but,  in  a  manner,  spiritually  and 
through  the  air,  the  old  unity  of  the  Empire  was  maintained. 
The  language  of  men's  deepest  thoughts  was  the  language  of 
Cicero  and  Pliny,  only  modified  by  the  flight  of  time ;  the  art 

1  '  Boclaeclen.'  Anglo-Saxon  Chronicle,  beg.  This  passage  only  occurs 
in  MSS.  D-F.  D  has  five  languages,  thus:  English,  Britwelsh  {i.e., 
British),  Scotch,  Pictish,  and  Boclceden.  E  and  F  have  six  :  English, 
British  (Britisc),  Welsh,  &c. 


WESTERN  CHRISTENDOM.  127 

of  writing,  by  which  they  recorded  their  thoughts,  had  travelled 

from   Rome  and   Milan  all  across  the  Western  Empire,  and 

was  at  this  moment  being  practised  in  its  full  perfection  on  the 

remotest  known  island  of  Europe.     The  same  absorbtion  in 

the  study  of  theology,  the  same  hopes  and  fears  about  the 

future  life,  were  common  to  all  Christian  Europe,  at  any  rate 

to  all  Western  Christendom. 

As  for  the  physical  conformation  of  Western  Christendom, 

that  too  was  changed  somewhat  from  what  it  had  been  in  the 

days  of  the  Roman  Empire. 

It  had  lost  almost  the  whole  of  Spain — a  huge 

A.D.  711. 
cantle — since   the  great  three-days'    battle  by  the 

banks  of  the  Guadalete,  when  Roderic  and  the  flower  of  the 
Goths  went  down  before  the  swords  of  the  Arabs;  and  now 
nearly  all  that  land  was  ruled  by  the  powerful  khalifs  of  Cordova. 
A  little  strip  in  the  north  was  still  reserved  to  Christendom. 
On  the  eastern  side  the  Spanish  March,  which  belonged  to 
the  Franks ;  its  boundary  extended  sometimes  as  far  as  the 
Ebro,  and  included  the  territory  of  the  Vascones  (Navarre), 
near  the  western  edge  of  the  Pyrenees,  but  generally  it  had  a 
smaller  compass ;  it  was  a  triangle,  whose  apex  lay  half-way 
along  the  line  of  the  Pyrenees,  whose  base  was  the  coast  line 
from  the  Spanish  frontier  to  Barcelona.  On  the  western  side 
was  the  remains  of  the  Gothic  power,  the  little  kingdom  of 
Asturias,  hidden  away  among  its  mountains,  soon  to  expand 
into  the  better-known  kingdom  of  Leon. 

In  return  for  what  it  had  lost  in  the  West,  in  the  East  the 
limits  of  Christendom  extended  far  beyond  the  anrient  limits 
of  the  Roman  Empire.  So  far  the  missionaries,  Irish  and 
English,  and  the  power  of  the  Frankish  State  had  done 
their  work.  Bavaria  (Bajuvaria)  Alamannia,  a  part  of  Bur- 
gundy, represented,  in  a  certain  sense,  the  Roman  provinces 
Vindelicia,   Rhaetia,   Noricum  ;   but  Bavaria  extended  beyond 


128  FIRST  CONTESTS. 

the  limit  of  these  provinces.  It  stretched  from  the  Alps  to  the 
Danube,  and  in  some  places  a  little  to  the  further  side  of  it, 
and  from  the  Lech  to  the  Enns.  Beyond  Bavaria  eastward 
were  further  acquisitions  recently  won — the  Ostmark,  which 
separated  Christendom  from  the  heathen  Slavs  and  barbarous 
Avars;  south  of  it  lay  the  province  of  Carinthia  (Pannonia), 
which  was  at  this  time  a  portion  of  the  kingdom  of  Italy. 
North  of  Alamannia  you  came  to  East  Frankland  (Franconia), 
which  stretched  on  both  sides  of  the  Rhine  from  the  Maas 
almost  to  the  source  of  the  Main  ;  and  east  of  East  Frankland 
lay  Thiiringia,  big  with  the  future  history  of  Germany. 

But  as  you  travelled  still  further  north,  the  limit  of  the 
empire  began  to  contract  again,  and  the  Rhine  more  nearly 
became,  as  of  old,  the  boundary  between  Rome  and  not- 
Rome,  for  beyond  it,  hidden  in  its  dense  forests,  lay  the 
fierce,  unconverted  nation  of  the  Saxons.  One  might  liken 
Western  Christendom  at  the  time  of  the  outbreak  of  the 
Saxon  war  to  a  huge  ellipse,  stretching  north-west  and  south- 
east, from  the  foot  of  Italy  to  the  north  of  Scotland ;  its  shorter 
axis  touching  those  two  nearest  foes  of  the  faith — the  Saxons 
in  the  north,  and  the  Saracens  in  the  south.  Then  the  two 
foci  of  this  ellipse  (a  little  misplaced,  it  is  true)  would  be  the 
two  capitals  of  the  West,  the  capitals  of  the  Church  and  of 
the  State — Rome  and  Aix-la-Chapelle.1 

II. 

The  land  of  the  Saxons  extended  from  very  near  the  Rhine 
at  one  part  (where  the  Lippe  flows  into  the  greater  river)  as 
far  as  the  mythic  Eyder,3  at  the  foot  of  the  Cimbric  Chersonese. 
Through  it  flowed  the  wizard  stream  of  the  Elbe,  and  emptied 

1  Aix-la-Chapelle  was  in  no  special  sense  the  capital  of  the  Frankish 
Empire  before  a.d.  795. 

2  yEgisdyr,  the  door  of  /Egir,  the  northern  sea-god. 


SAXON/A.  129 

itself  into  the  German  Ocean.  The  great  mass  of  the  Saxon 
people  lay  upon  this  side  of  the  Elbe,  and  were  known  (to 
the  chroniclers)  as  the  Cis-Albiani  or  Hither  Saxons ;  in  a  little 
corner  of  land  between  the  Elbe  and  the  Eyder  and  the 
Baltic  lay  the  Trans-Albiani  or  Farther  Saxons.  The  Hither 
Saxons  were  in  their  turn  divided  into  three  separate  tribes  or 
nations — the  Eastphalians,  the  Angrarii  or  Engern,  and  the 
Westphalians. 

But  of  all  those  confederated  German  tribes  which  had  once 
stretched  along  the  southern  shore  of  the  Baltic,  among  whom 
Nerthus  had  journeyed  in  her  shrouded  car,  none  now 
remained.  The  Saxons  had  no  neighbours  of  their  own 
creed  and  kin  save  the  Danes  of  Jutland.  These  were  their 
only  allies,  and  the  natural  enemies  of  the  crusading  Franks. 
To  the  east  of  the  Further  Saxons,  on  the  southern  Baltic 
coast,  lay  none  but  Slavs,  their  natural  enemies.  With  the 
nearest  of  these,  the  Abodriti  (Obotriti),  Charlemagne  entered 
into  an  alliance. 

It  was  in  a.d.  772  that  the  Frankish  troops  first 
crossed  the  borders  and  appeared  among  the  wood- 
land villages  and  sacred  groves  of  the  heathen. 

They  were  trespassing  into  that  very  region  from  which 
Drusus  had  turned  back  in  awe,  and  where  even  the  Roman 
eagles  had  gone  down.  The  same  forests  and  the  same 
marshes  that  had  entrapped  Varus  lay  in  wait  for  them  ;  the 
same  brotis,  no  doubt,  were  raised  to  impede  their  advance. 
But  perhaps  the  Franks,  though  converted,  were  more  proof 
against  the  incantations  of  wise  women,  and  less  strange  to 
the  genius  loci  than  the  Romans  had  been.1  For,  in  fact, 
they  met  with  but  slight  resistance  to  their  first  expedition  : 

1  'Tremit  Saxonia  inaccessa  paludibus'  (Widukind). 
IO 


130  FIRST  CONTESTS. 

and  Christendom  heard  with  delight  that  they  had  taken  one 
of  the  Saxon  strongholds,  Eresburg,  had  penetrated  into  a 
very  sacred  grove  in  the  Lippe-Detmold  country,  and  had 
there  cut  down  a  holy  tree  or  pillar  called  Irminsul.1 

We  know  what  these  sacred  groves  were.  The  mention  of 
one  in  this  place  is  a  link  which  unites  the  far-off  past  of 
Tacitus's  day  with  the  still  longer-lived  heathenism  of  the  north, 
represented  in  the  sacred  grove  of  Upsala.  It  was  near 
eight  hundred  years  since  Augustus  had  ordered  his  camps  to 
be  broken  up  and  his  posts  to  fall  back  from  all  the  once- 
conquered  country  between  Paderborn2  and  the  Rhine,  and 
so  given  back  the  country  to  barbarism.  Since  then  till  now 
we  may  believe  that  the  ancient  life  of  the  Teutons  and  their 
ancient  creed  had  undergone  little  change. 

The  Saxons  were,  maybe,  this  first  time  taken  by  surprise. 
The  fierceness  with  which  they  resisted  other  attacks  and 
revenged  their  disasters  was  worthy  of  tne  ground  on  which 
they  fought,  and  would  have  been  wrorthy  of  Arminius  and 
his  Chatti.  Two  years  after  there  opened  out  to  them  the 
prospect  of  revenge.  For  Charles  was  called  away  that  year 
into  Italy,  where  Desiderius,  the  Lombard  king,  was  deep 
in  those  quarrels  with  the  Pope,  out  of  which  the  Franks 
reaped  so  many  benefits.  Pope  Adrian  I.  had  definitely  gone 
over  to  the  side  of  the  Franks;  and  it  was  his  declared 
partizanship  for  Charles  which  set  Desiderius's  army  in  motion 
towards  Rome.  An  appeal  from  Adrian  brought  Charles  over 
the  Alps  to  depose  the  Lombard  king.  Thereupon  the  Saxons 
made  a  counter-raid  into  the  territory  of  the  Franks,  burning 
and  slaughtering  all  they  could.      They  streamed  into  Hesse. 

1  Einhard,  Annates^  s.  a.  772.  As  most  of  the  incidents  of  the  Saxon 
war  are  taken  from  the  Annates  of  Einhard,  it  is  unnecessary  to  repeat  the 
references  thereto,  which  are  sufficiently  given  by  the  dates  alone. 

2  Aliso,  the  Roman  station,  lay  near  the  modern  Paderborn.  The 
Romans  in  Aliso  had  made  a  brave  stand  after  the  defeat  of  Varus. 


SAXON  WAR,  A.D.  774-776.  131 

There  they  found  the  Church  which  Boniface  had  built  out  of 
the  wood  of  Thor's  oak  at  Geismar,  and  this  they  burnt;  a  due 
set-off  against  the  destruction  of  their  own  holy  IrminsuL 
Two  Saxon  '  nations  '  took  part  in  these  attacks. 

AD    774 

The    Engern,    who   had   possessed   the    Irminsul, 

made    the    raid     into     Hesse.       The    Westphalians    turned 

north,  and  burnt   in  like  fashion    the   churches   east   of   the 

Rhine    as   far  as    Deventer   in    Frisia.      They   were   but   few 

against  an  empire.     If  heathendom  had  banded  together  all 

its   forces    the   contest   would   have  been  more  equal.     Who 

can  tell  what  the  results  might  then  have  been  ?     But,  again, 

we  reflect  that  such  great  combinations  are  impossible  among 

half-savage  people  such  as  these. 

In    77^    Charlemagne   determined    to   conduct     .  _    „ 

,  ,  ,     .  A.D.  775. 

the    war    upon   a    larger    scale   and    m    a   more 

thoroughgoing  manner  than  heretofore.     It  had,  in  fact,  been 

solemly  decreed  in  council  that  Saxony  was  to  be  conquered 

and    forcibly   converted    to    Christianity.      Charles   marched 

beyond  the  Weser  into  the  very  heart  of  the  Saxon  territory, 

and  harried  it  on  every  side.     He  manned  two  forts,  Eresburg 

and  Sigesburg,  hard  by  the  Weser  and  the  Lippe,  to  hold  the 

Saxons  in  check. 

Next    year   the    king    was    again    called    away    . 

into  Italy,  and   the  Saxons  rose  again  in  all  the 

conquered    land,    and    the    forts    were   retaken.     But    when 

they    tried    to    cross    the    Rhine    they   were    repulsed,    and 

once  more  the   iron   forest  of  the  Frankish  spears  appeared 

in   their   leafy   retreats.       We   may   surmise   of   what   nature 

was    this    guerilla   warfare    of    the    heathen   Teutons.      The 

warriors  of  the  mark  made  their  forays  and  escaped  behind 

the    Danish   frontier;    the   more   peaceable    villagers,    unless 

they    could    escape    in    time,   were    left  to   pay  the    penalty. 

They  might  promise  submission  and  give  hostages ;  but  they 


i32  FIRST  CONTESTS, 

.could  not  control  the  action  of  the  warriors.  Charles  inter- 
preted each  fresh  outbreak  of  hostilities  as  treachery,  which 
might  be  justly  avenged  by  a  slaughter  of  prisoners ;  and  hate 
begot  hate. 

There  had  been  local  tribal  wars,  no  doubt,  without  number, 
but  nothing  since  the  days  of  Varus  to  daunt  the  woods  in  the 
shape  of  a  great  foreign  invasion  until  the  crusade  of  Charle- 
magne. Charles  now  claimed  to  hold  the  country  as  con- 
quered territory,  as  part  of  his  empire.  He  summoned  a 
'  placitum '  (general  council)  for  the  year  at  Paderborn,  close 
by  the  site  of  the  old  Roman  camp,  Aliso. 

It  is  at  this  time  that  we  once  asfain  catch  sieht 
A  D    777        .  .        . 

(in  the  pages  of  history)  of  a  Scandinavian  people 

and  hear  the  names  of  two  of  their  kings.1     They  were  two 

kings  of  South  Denmark,  Siegfred  and  Godfred  by  name.    Such 

protection  as  he  could  safely  give,  Siegfred  gave  to  the  Saxons. 

Widukind,  the  great  Saxon  leader,  who  now  appears  upon  the 

scene,  many  times  took  refuge  at  his  court,  and  is  said  to  have 

married  his  sister.2     But  as  Siegfred  likewise  sent  an  embassy 

to  Charles,  and  never  in  his  own  person  took  arms  to  assist 

his  neighbours,  we  must  perhaps  look  upon  him  as  a  sort  of 

Maroboduus  (the  Markman),  a  temporizer  between  heathendom 

and  its  enemies,  as  Marobod  was  in  the  days  of  Arminius. 

In  the  same  year  Widukind  himself  first  appears  to  view. 

Widukind  (Child  of  the  Forest  3)  was  a  prince  in  Westphalia. 

1  I  have  no  space  here  to  discuss  Munch's  attempted  reconstruction  of 
Scandinavian  history  before  the  opening  of  the  Viking  Age,  Det  Norske 
Folks  Historie,  i.  195-355.  But  I  think  it  must  be  conceded  that  the 
conclusions  arrived  at  are  for  the  most  part  too  hypothetical  to  be  used  as 
history. 

2  Botho,  Chron.  Pict.  in  Scrip,  rer.  Brunsv.,  iii.  292,  not  a  reliable 
authority  (Kruse,  i.  5). 

3  Another  etymology  given  not  long  after  his  day  was  '  white  child,' 
from  his  baptismal  garment,  a  bitter  nickname  (Kruse,  p.  5).  He  had 
apparently  possessed  another  name,  Withmund  (Kruse  p.  25). 


SAXON  WAR,  A.D.  778.  133 

Beaten  this  time,  and  obliged  to  fly,  he  took  refuge  with  Sieg- 
fred  in  Sleswick.  But  anon  the  hopes  of  the  Saxons  rose 
once  more,  for  a  cloud  had  gathered  upon  the  opposite  side  of 
the  kingdom,  and  the  Franks  were  about  to  suffer  the  most 
famous  reverse  which  they  ever  experienced  in  the  long  reign 
of  Charles  the  Great. 

Not   many   years   previously  Charlemagne   had 

A   Tj      77ft 

added  the  Basque  province  to  the  Empire  of  the 
Franks.  Its  inhabitants  were  wild  mountaineers  of  primitive 
race,  whose  descendants  to  this  day  speak  a  language  not  of 
the  Indo-European  family.  This  year  (778)  the  king  led  a 
great  expedition  against  the  Saracens  of  Spain,  advancing 
through  the  narrow  passes  of  the  Pyrenees  to  the  Ebro,  and 
beyond  the  Ebro  to  Saragossa.  The  enemy  retreated  before 
him  fighting.  Learning,  it  may  be,  tjiat  their  great  foe  was 
so  far  withdrawn,  the  Saxons  made  ready  for  another  raid  in 
Frankland,  and  news  was  brought  to  Charles  afar  off  that 
their  ravages  had  begun.  With  the  vanguard  of  his  troops 
he  hurried  homeward,  leaving  the  rearguard  to  follow  under 
the  command  of  Roland,  Count — or  shall  we  say  Marquis — of 
the  Breton  marches.1 

But  as  the  Franks  struggled  through  the  pass — the  western 
pass  from  Pampeluna  to  Dax — the  wild  Basques,  who  had  so 
lately  and  perforce  been  incorporated  into  the  Frankish 
kingdom,  took  the  occasion  to  revolt  and  to  fall  upon  this 
rearguard  and  cut  it  to  pieces.2  Charles  heard  of  the  disaster 
after  he  had  reached  France,  and  turned  upon  his  steps  to 
revenge  the  defeat.3     This  is  that  battle  of  Roncesvalles  so 

1  Einhard,  Vita,  c.  9. 

2  They  were  no  doubt  supported  by  the  Goths.  Charles  had  taken  by 
force  of  arms  the  Gothic  city  of  Pampeluna,  and  on  his  retreat  he  destroyed 
it. 

3  'But,'  says  Einhard,  'found  no  means  of  coming  to  close  quarters 
with  the  offenders.' 


i34  FIRST  CONTESTS. 

abundantly  celebrated  in  the  traditions  of  a  later  age.  It 
greatly  saddened  the  heart  of  Charles.  And  though  the 
Saxons  far  away  probably  knew  little  of  all  this,1  it  at  least 
improved  their  opportunity,  and  they  made  a  fiercer  attack 
than  ever  upon  the  Franks.  '  They  had  not  come  for  booty, 
but  for  vengeance,'  says  Einhard.  They  threatened  the  bones 
of  Boniface  at  Fulda,  where,  after  his  life-labours,  they  reposed. 
They  swept  away  the  Frankish  garrisons  between  them  and 
the  Rhine,  which  they  reached  at  Deutz.  That  was  an  old 
Roman  camp.  The  Saxons  could  not  contrive  to  take  it,  nor 
to  cross  the  river,  but  they  spread  all  along  the  right  bank  of 
the  stream  as  far  as  Ehrenbreitstein,  opposite  the  Moselle. 

The  iron  king  of  the  Franks  was  not  one  to  bend  from  his 

design  before  these  passing  misadventures.     He  only  took  up 

the  task  of  conquering  Saxony  with  more  determined  purpose. 

He  divided  the  subdued  territory  into  ecclesiastical  districts. 

Missionaries,  the  pupils  of   Boniface,  were  placed  over  them  : 

they   were   to    complete   the   rough    work   of  conversion    by 

preaching,  under  the  shadow  of  the  Frankish  arms,  the  Gospel 

of  Peace.     Charles  and  his  Franks  and  his  ecclesiastics  now 

stood  within  but  a  little  distance  of  the  Danish  frontier ;  only 

the  Farther  Saxons — the  North  Albiani — between  them  and  it. 

And  it  was  now  that  Charlemagne  entered  into  alliance  with 

the    Slavonic   Abodriti  against  both   Saxons  and  Danes.     It 

cannot  be  said,  therefore,  that  on  this  side  the  Baltic  nations 

sought  a  quarrel  with  Christendom.     Unwillingly  they  entered 

in,  but  being  in  so  bore  it  that  their  opposers  would  learn  soon 

enough  to  beware  of  them. 

1  Probably,  but  not  certainly.  The  news  of  the  great  defeat  may  have 
reached  as  far  as  the  earthquake  which,  we  are  told,  accompanied  it, 
namely,  '  from  Michel  du  Peril  to  the  Saints '  [from  Mont  St.  Michel  to 
the  Three  Kings  of  Cologne]  {Chanson  de  Roland).  Whether  the  Saxon 
attack  preceded  or  followed  the  Roncesvalles  defeat  is  not  absolutely 
certain.     Compare  the  accounts  in  Einhard  and  the  monk  of  St.  Gall. 


EMBASSIES  TO  CHARLES.  135 

In  781  Charles  was  in  Rome;  his  children, 
Pippin  and  Lewis,  were  brought  to  Pope  Adrian 
to  be  anointed ;  the  alliance  between  the  king  and  the  pope 
was  strengthened,  and  the  ground  was  prepared  for  that  annus 
mirabilis  nineteen  years  later,  when  the  diadem  of  the  Cresars 
was  placed  on  the  brow  of  Charles.  This  year  Saxon  affairs 
were  neglected. 

But  in  782  Charles  was  again  by  the  Lippe.  He 
had  made  himself  winter  quarters  in  Saxony,  called 
them  Heristallum,  a  sort  of  pun,  which  one  might  interpret 
'Army  Place,'  or  Heristal,  the  ancestral  home  of  his  race, 
showing  how  much  he  felt  himself  at  home  in  these  new 
conquests.  While  here  he  received  embassies  from  people 
far  separated  from  each  other  and  little  known  to  Christian 
Europe ;  from  the  king  of  the  Avars  in  the  south,  the  second 
race  of  Hunnish  or  Turkic  invaders  of  Europe  ;  from  the  north 
from  Siegfred,  King  of  the  Danes.  Probably  Siegfred  sent  to 
excuse  himself  for  receiving  Widukind  after  his  last  flight. 
Widukind  was  with  him  at  that  moment,  and  was  only  waiting 
his  opportunity. 

His  opportunity  was  the  tyrrany  of  Charles's 
rule.  It  was  about  this  time  that  were  compiled 
those  capitularies  for  the  enforcement  of  Christianity  upon  the 
Saxons,  laws  which  a  Philip  of  Spain  or  a  Torquemada  might 
have  envied  ;  for  they  imposed  a  death  penalty  upon  any- 
thing which  might  seem  to  savour  of  recalcitrancy  in  accept- 
ing the  new  creed.1  Yet  Charles  felt  so  sure  of  his  ground 
that  he  had  begun  drafting  Saxon  soldiers  into  his  army. 
Presently,  when  the  Frank  king's  back  was  turned,  Widukind 
returned  to  Saxony,  new-furnished,  we  may  believe,  with  help 
from  the  Normanni. 

1   Pertz,  Leges,  i.   48-50,   Catitulare  Paderbmnnense.     A.n.   785,  is  the 
date  assigned  to  them  in  Pertz;  Dahn  gives  a.d.  782,  Dent.  Gesch.,  ii.  304. 


136  FIRST  CONTESTS. 

He  first  swept  across  the  Danish  frontier  into  Frisia,  and 
burnt  some  of  the  new-built  churches  in  that  land.1  Then  he 
came  again  into  Saxony,  raised  there  an  army  from  the  ranks 
themselves  of  Charles's  conscripts,  caught  a  Frankish  force 
commanded  by  one  of  Charles's  lieutenants,  and  defeated  it 
at  Siindal.  Thereupon  Charles  exacted  a  fearful  penalty  for 
this  treason  by  beheading  four  thousand  five  hundred  Saxon 
prisoners  by  the  banks  of  the  Alar ;  and  he  made  preparations 
for  a  campaign  greater  than  any  which  had  gone  before.  The 
self-confidence  of  his  opponents  gave  him  tne  rare  and  much 
coveted  opportunity  of  fighting  two  pitched  battles  with  them, 
one  on  Mount  Osning,  in  Detmold,  one  by  the  banks  of  the 
Hase,  the  boundary  of  the  Westphalian  kingdom.  The  first 
was  doubtful ;  the  second  a  decisive  victory  for  the  Franks. 
From  this  date  the  great  stress  of  the  Saxon  war  was  over, 
though  fresh  revolts  were  continually  breaking  out,  and  much 
harrying  of  the  land  was  needful,  and  severe  enough  coercion 
of  many  kinds,  before  the  two  great  Saxon  leaders,  Widukind 
and  Abbio,2  would  consent  to  come  in  and  be 
'  '  785"  baptized.  They  did  this  in  785,  and  were  baptized 
at  Attigny. 

What  meaning  they  attached  to  the  ceremony  one  would  be 
curiuus  to  know.  That  it  was  a  token  of  submission  would 
be  enough  to  make  it  hateful  in  their  eyes.  They  may  have 
heard  from  their  forefathers  how,  in  the  days  of  the  great 
Roman  power,  the  subjects  of  Rome  had  been  made  to 
worship  the  ashes  of  the  emperor.  Now  they  heard  from  the 
Christians  of  a  new  King  of  all  the  world,  called  Christ ;  He 
was  apparently  the  head,  or  had  been  the  head,  of  the  Christian 
empire;    images  of  him,  it  appeared,   were  now  set   up  for 


1  Vita  Leode^ar.    (Kruse,  19). 

2  Or  Albio  =  Alboin  (Paul.  Diac)  =  ^Elfwine? 


ENGLAND. 


137 


worship.1  That  I  opine  was  about  what  baptism  implied  to 
these  Saxons.  Afterwards  they  took  to  the  idea  more  kindly, 
and  treated  it  as  a  good-natured  joke  to  oblige  the  Christians 
and  get,  at  the  same  time,  the  present  of  a  fair  linen  garment. 
So  much  is  implied  by  a  story  told  by  the  monk  of  St.  Gallen, 
which,  if  it  is  not  true,  might  very  well  be  so.2 

A  century  later,  when  Saxonia  had  become  not  only  Chris- 
tian, but  rather  notable  for  its  piety,  a  gentle  monkish  bard, 
the  Csedmon  of  old  Saxony,  turned  into  verse  the  history  ot 
the  Gospel.  In  his  mouth  the  Heliand  (Heiland)  becomes  a 
Saxon  prince. 

The  heathens  may  have  redoubled  baptism,  too,  as  a  sort 
of  Christian  incantation,  just  as  in  after-years  men,  who  were 
scarcely  Christians  in  any  other  respect,  looked  upon  it  as  a 
kind  of  magic  passport  past  the  terrors  of  the  under-world. 

III. 

Einhard  counts  the  Saxon  war  to  have  lasted  from  a.d.  772 
to  a.d.  804 — thirty-three  years  in  all,3  the  lifetime  of  a  genera- 
tion— truly,  then,  we  may  call  it  a  life's  work  for  Charlemagne. 
But  the  backbone  of  it  was  now  broken;  and  we  may  turn 
from  its  consideration  to  other  phases  of  the  opening  war 
between  Heathendom  and  Christendom,  and  for  a  moment 
leave  Continental  Europe  and  revisit  these  lands. 

When  we  were  last  concerned  with  this  country  the  northern 
Heptarchic  kingdom  was  at  the  height  of  its  glory,  although 
it  had  even  then  entered  on  its  long  rivalry  with 
Mercia.      It  succumbed  to  Pendaj    but    it  rose 
again  after  the  battle  of  Winwaedfeld,  655.     From  that  time 

1  Set-bergs  kveda  sitja  sunnr  at  Udrar  brunni ; 

Sva  hefir  ramr  gramr  remdan  RSms  banda  sik  londom. 

(An  Old  Norse  fragment  on  Christ.) 

2  See  ch.  VI I.  3  Vita  C.  Imp.  c.  7. 


138  FIRST  CONTESTS. 

forward  for  one  century  it  remained  the  most  brilliant  state  in 
Christendom.  It  had  succeeded  to  the  mantle  of  the  Irish 
Church.  The  illuminated  MSS.  of  Northumbria  imitated  but 
rivalled  those  of  Ireland.  In  sanctity  it  boasted  the  names 
of  Aidan  and  Cuthbert  and  Hilda,  of  Wilfred,  of  John  of 
Beverley,  and  many  more.  Its  poet  was  Caedmon,  and  its 
historian — the  greatest  that  many  centuries  produced — was 
Bede.  Its  school  at  York,  and  its  library,  founded  and  en- 
riched by  Ecgberht  and  .Ethelberht,  were  famous  throughout 
Europe.  From  this  school  had  come  the  greatest  scholar  of 
the  day — Alcuin. 

But  though  intellectually  Northumbria  still  kept  the  lead, 
she  was  no  longer  politically  the  first  kingdom  in  the  Hep- 
tarchy. A  long  succession  of  able  rulers  had  raised  Mercia 
to  this  height,  and  Mercia's  rival  was  now  not  Northumbria 
but  Wessex.  In  fact  the  northern  kingdom  had  entered  upon 
a  period  of  turbulence  which  was  to  end  in  something  like 
anarchy.  It  had  begun  'murdering  its  lords,'  as  Charlemagne 
said ;  this  anarchy  would  only  continue  and  increase  till  the 
country  lay  an  ea*y  prey  to  the  arms  of  the  Vikings. 

Wessex,  on  the  contrary,  the  future  hope  of  England,  was 
rising.  She  had  almost  succeeded  in  gaining  the  upper  hand  of 
Mercia  in  the  previous  generation,  when  the  King  of  Mercia, 
Ethelbald  the  Proud,  was  twice  defeated  by  CmSred  of  Wessex, 
at  Burford  and  again  at  Seckington,  and  on  the 
A.D.  752,  755.    latter   fiel(^    t  djsdammg  to   fleGj>   was    slain<      But 

the  middle  kingdom  rose  to  power  again  under 
A.D.  757-796.  q^  ^q  greatest  English  king  since  Eadwine,  a 
kind  of  lesser  or  mimic  Charlemagne  in  the  British  island. 
All  the  countries  intermediate  between  Northumbria  and 
Wessex  fell  under  the  power  of  Oflfa ;  and  the  King  of 
Wessex,  Burhred,  sought  his  alliance.  Offa  gave  Burhred  his 
daughter  in  marriage,  and  assistance  in  driving  from  Wessex 


ENGLAND.  139 

his  rival  (a  name  far  greater  than  his)  Ecgberht,  who  fled  to 
the  court  of  Charles  the  Great.  The  protection  there  given 
to  the  fugitive  did  not,  however,  destroy  the  friendly  relations 
between  Offa  and  Charles. 

There  are,  indeed,  three  links  which  in  a  special  way  seem  to 
unite  the  England  of  this  epoch  with  the  great  Frank  Empire  : 
first  from  Northumbria  comes  Alcuin  to  the  court  of  Charles, 
the  intellectual  prime  minister,  as  he  has  been  called,  of  the 
Frank  king;  then  there  is  the  correspondence  between  the 
Mercian  Offa  and  Charlemagne;  and  thirdly,  the  flight  of 
the  West  Saxon  Ecgberht,  with  much  of  the  future  hope  of 
England  upon  his  shoulders,  to  the  Frankish  court. 

But  the  close  connection  between  the  lands  upon  both  sides 
of  the  Channel  is  best  shown  by  the  introduction  of  a  new 
currency  into  England,  clearly  modelled  upon  the  contem- 
porary currency  of  Francia,  which  itself  was  comparatively 
new  ;  for  it  came  in  with  the  house  of  Heristal,  about  the 
middle  of  the  eighth  century.1 

In  many  private  ways  the  bonds  of  union  between  the 
neighbouring  countries  were  being  drawn  closer  during  this 
peaceful  and  prosperous  interlude.  The  English  lover  of 
travel  was  not  obliged  to  wait  for  the  high  promptings  of 
missionary  zeal.  The  vagrant  spirit  still  put  on  a  religious  garb, 
as  most  of  the  acts  of  those  days  did,  but  it  was  one  not  so 
onerous  as  missionary  work.  The  Englishman's  grand  tour 
of  those  days  was  a  pilgrimage  to  Rome.  Bede  tells  us  how 
many  of  the  upper  class  in  his  day  undertook  it.  A  long  list 
of  pilgrim  kings  is  preserved.2  One  incidental  event  of  Ofifa's 
reign  is  a  witness  to  the  prevalence  of  this  habit.  He  pur- 
chased a  piece  of  land  in  Flanders  in  order  to  build  a  house 

1  Keary,    Catalogue  of  English  Coins  in  the  British  Museum,  vol.  i. 
Tntrod.  p   xxiii. 

2  See  above,  p.  113. 


140  FJRST  CONTESTS. 

where  the  English  pilgrims  on  landing  might  find  refresh- 
ment. From  which  we  see  that  the  Continental  route  of  those 
days  was  rather  the  Dover  to  Ostend  route  than  the  Dover  to 
Calais.     More  probably,  however,  most  of  the   English  ships 

sailed  from  the  Thames. 

* 

It  was  noteworthy  how  up  to  this  period  whatever  wars 
might  still  rage  on  land — even  between  Christian  and  Christian 
as  in  this  country — the  sea  seemed  by  general  consent  set 
apart  to  be  a  home  of  peace. 

Their  days  were  too  long  gone  for  men  to  remember  the 
Saxon  piracies  in  the  English  Channel,  or  to  take  notice  of  a 
few  chance  revivals  of  piracy  in  later  times,  as  by  King 
Hygelac,  and  others  of  less  account,  in  waters  more  remote. 
The  sea  seemed  to  be  consecrated  as  the  home  of  peace  when 
the  Irish  missionaries  entrusted  themselves  to  its  waves,  and  to 
have  remained  so  since,  as  in  every  land  monastery  after 
monastery  rose  upon  its  shores.  So  far  as  men  knew  (for  what 
could  they  guess  of  the  thoughts  of  the  Baltic  nations?),  no 
hostile  feeling  existed  between  any  people  separated  by  the 
sea;  none  between  the  nations  on  the  opposite  sides  of  the 
English  Channel,  although  the  Franks  were  fierce  enough 
against  our  kinsfolk  in  Old  Saxony.  And  though  we  were 
hostile  enough  to  the  Celts  of  our  own  island— British  and 
Picts — the  feeling  died  down  when  it  reached  the  seashore, 
and  towards  the  Celts  of  Ireland  we  had  nothing  but  goodwill. 
Once,  and  once  only,  an  English  king  had  sent  an  army  into 
Ireland,  and  had  '  miserably  harried  that  harmless  people  who 
have  always  been  so  friendly  to  the  English,'  says  Beda,1  who 
counts  the  destruction  which  shortly  overtook  the  same  king 
(Ecgfrith),  a  direct  retribution  for  this  impious  act. 

1  Misere  vastavit  gent  em  innoxiam  et  nationi  Angloriim  semper  amicissi- 
mam  (H.  Ei,  iv.  2b).  The  words  sound  strange,  it  must  be  owned,  to 
modern  ears. 


WARNINGS  OF  FUTURE  CHANGE.  141 

Merchants,  too,  doubtless,  were  passing  now  and  again  over 
the  German  Ocean,  where  the  Frisians  were  already  beginning 
to  anticipate  the  history  of  the  Netherlands,  and  were  develop- 
ing into  the  great  commercial  people  of  Northern  Europe. 
Yet  if  we  are  to  believe  the  report  of  later  days,  there  were  not 
wanting  in  the  midst  of  all  this  prosperity  heavenly  warnings 
of  future  change.  Fiery  dragons  were  seen  careering  through 
the  air,  fit  type  of  the  dragon-ships  which  would  ere  long  be 
seen  on  every  northern  sea,  which  had  perhaps  even  now  left 
the  safe  harbours  of  the  Vik  (the  Skager  Rack),  and  tempted 
the  open  ocean.  In  a  miraculous  manner  some  men's  gar- 
ments were  found  suddenly  marked  with  a  cross,  as  if  to  show 
they  were  destined  to  martyrdom.  And  Alcuin,  returning 
about  this  time  on  a  brief  visit  to  his  beloved  York,  beheld  a 
portentous  sign :  a  rain  of  blood  descending  upon  the  minster.1 

But  more  real  and  unmistakable  was  the  portent 
of  three  keels  which  one  summer  day  of  789  put  789" 

into  a  harbour  of  the  Dorset  coast.2  They  were  thought  to  be 
merchant  vessels,  and  the  Port  Reeve,  good  easy  man,  rode 
down  from  the  king's  vill  to  the  shore  to  exact  his  port  dues. 

But  they  were  not  merchants  ;  they  were  '  northern  men,'  the 
1  first  ships  of  the  Danish  men  that  sought  the  English  land ' ; 
so  far  as  we  can  ascertain,  they  were  the  first  northern  pirates 
who  had  appeared  on  any  Christian  shore  since  the  days  of 
Hugleik  ;  the  precursors  of  an  endless  series  of  future  raiders.3 

1  Jaffe,  Mon.  Alc^  p.  182  (Rer.  Ger.  Bib.  vi.). 

2  A  S.  Chron.,  A.D.  787. 

3  The  interpretation  of  the  expression,  '  iii.  Scypu  Nordmanna  of  Haere- 
daland  '  has  been  the  subject  of  more  controversy  than  any  other  passage  in 
the  Chronicle.  Haerethaland  has  been  interpreted  as  Hardeland  in  Jutland 
(Munch),  and  Hordaland  in  Norway  (Maurer,  Storm).  The  word  does  not 
occur  in  the  best  MSS.  of  the  Chronicle,  and  in  the  passage  the  ships  are 
said  to  be  the  first  ships  of  the  Danish  men  which  sought  the  land  of  Eng- 
land. Steenstrup's  ingenious  suggested  emendation  '  olerherian  ])xt  land  ' 
must  be  noted  \Normanneme  ii.   19,  and  cf.   H.    Hunt,  787).     I  canm  t 


142  FIRST  CONTESTS. 

They  drew  their  arms,  killed  the  Port  Reeve,1  took,  we  may, 

believe,  some  trifle  of  booty,  and  then  sailed  away  into  the 

unknown  whence  they  had  come,  and  were  heard  of  no  more. 

Four  years  after  the  descent  upon  the  Dorset 

'  '  ^or  '"  coast  a  far  more  terrible  Viking  raid  took  place  in 
Northumbria.  The  scene  of  it  was  that  island  of  Lindisfarne 
(nearly  opposite  the  old  Bernician  capital  Bamborough),  where 
the  first  Columban  monastery  had  been  built.  We  saw  how 
Aidan,  the  Columban  missionary  to  Northumbria,  had  followed 
the  example  of  his  master,  and  as  he  made  his  holy  island,  his 
Delos,  in  Iona,  so  had  Aidan  chosen  this  Holy  Isle  of  Lindis- 
farne. It  was  not  quite  an  island,  for  it  was  united  at  low  tide 
by  a  strip  of  land,  which,  twice  a  day,  the  turbulent  surge 
covered  and  laid  bare — '  Qui  videlicet  locus,  accedente  et 
recedente  rheumate,  bis  quotidie  instar  insulse  maris  circum- 
luitur  undis,  bis  renudato  Ittore  contiguus  terrae  redditur.'2 

It  was  on  this  Lindisfarne  that  in  793  a  Viking  fleet  fell.3 
By  chance  ?  We  cannot  tell.  Some  have  thought  that  one  of 
the  rival  factions  which  at  that  moment  divided  the  kingdom 
of  Northumbria  invited  ihem  into  the  land.  We  find  plenty 
of  other  instances  of  such  occurrences.  But  I  do  not  know 
that  there  is  adequate  evidence  for  it  in  this  case.     Now  first 

accept  Mr.  Howorth's  suggestion  that  the  date  of  this  raid  is  subsequent  to 
the  attack  on  Lindisfarne  (Trs.  of  J\oy.  IJist.  Soc.  vii.),  though  it  is 
accepted  by  the  editors  of  the  Corp.  Poet.  Bor.  The  above-quoted  sentence 
seems  to  me  fatal  to  it  ;  and  as  with  Steenstrup  I  believe  these  raiders  to 
have  been  Danes,  there  are  no  difficulties  in  the  supposition  of  an  attack 
on  Wessex.  I  confess,  however,  that  the  appearance  of  these  '  three  keels  ' 
which  figure  so  often  in  Teutonic  migration  legends  (e.g.,  Goths,  Jutes)  gives 
the  account  a  somewhat  mythic  air. 

1  ^thelweard  gives  us  his  name — Beaduheard.         2  Beda,  H.  E.  iii.  3. 

'  A  S.  Chr.,  s.a.  ;  Sym.  Dun.,  H.  D.  E.  c.  v.  The  dates  at  this  period 
are  very  uncertain.  It  is  quite  possible  that  this  attack  on  Lindisfarne  fell 
in  the  same  year  as  the  attacks  on  Glamorganshire  and  Rechru  mentioned 
below.  Cf.  also  An.  Ult.  793  (=794),  which  Steenstrup,  o.c,  takes  to  refer 
to  the  attacks  on  England,  Skeene,  C.  S.,  to  attacks  on  the  northern 
islands  of  Scotland.     The  first  view  seems  to  me  the  most  reasonable. 


VIKING  ATTACK  ON  LIND1SFARNE.  143 

was  seen  in  all  its  terror  the  Furor  Normannorum.  The 
pirates  landed  on  the  island;  of  the  monks  of  Lindisfarne  some 
they  took  prisoners,  some  they  drove  into  the  sea.  They  rifled, 
and  then  burnt  the  monastery  and  its  shrine.  And  a  cry  of 
horror  rose  over  Europe,  where  a  thousand  religious  and 
literary  associations  connected  with  the  names  of  Aidan  and 
Cuthbert  and  Bede,  and  the  great  days  of  the  Northumbrian 
Church  were  linked  about  the  spot.  Our  imagination,  which 
fails  to  answer  to  the  meagre  accounts  of  the  raid  which  have 
come  down  to  us,  awakes  somewhat  as  we  read  the  letters  in 
which  Alcuin  mourns  over  the  outrage.1  'Three  centuries  and 
a  half  have  we  and  our  forefathers  been  here  in  this  fair 
Britain,  and  never  before  has  such  a  horror  fallen  upon  the 
land  as  has  now  come  upon  us  at  the  hands  of  the  heathen. 
Nor  has  anything  like  their  mode  of  navigation  been  heard  of 
before.  See  the  Church  of  St.  Cuthbtrt,  drenched  w7ith  the 
blood  of  the  priests  of  God,  reft  of  all  its  treasures;  the  noblest 
spot  in  all  Britain  given  over  to  be  a  prey  to  the  heathen. 
There,  where  after  the  departure  of  Paulinus  from  York, 
Christianity  took  a  new  beginning  among  our  people — it  seems 
as  if  a  beginning  were  to  be  made  of  misery  and  war.  Who 
would  not  be  afeared  ?  Who  would  not  weep  as  for  the 
enslavement  of  his  country  ?  ' 

The  calamity  was  new  and  strange.  But  Alcuin  took  in  its 
aspects  at  a  glance,  and  saw  that  it  would  not  remain  an  isolated 
one.  He  wrote  especially  to  two  monasteries  closely  connected 
with  Lindisfarne  and  with  each  other — one  at  Wearmouth,  the 
other  upon  the  J  arrow.  These  two  houses  were  linked 
monasteries  under  one  foundation.  They  were  founded  by 
Bendict  Biscop.  To  us  they  have  nearer  and  more  real 
associations  even  than  the  home  of  Cuthbert  and  of  Aidan. 

2  Ep.  Ale.  22  (Jaffe,  Bib.  Rer.  Ger.  vol.  vi.). 


144  FIRST  CONTESTS. 

For  Monkwearmouth  was  the  spiritual  birthplace  and  Jarrow 
was  the  abiding  home,  and  made  the  narrow  world  of  the 
father  of  English  history  and  English  literature.  The  eyes 
which  could  look  forward  and  backward  along  the  stream  of 
time,  and  had  learnt  to  measure  events  so  justly,  had  perhaps 
never  seen  any  earthly  prospect  save  the  country  which  for  a 
few  miles  stretched  between  the  precincts  of  Jarrow  monastery 
and  the  monastery  at  Monkwearmouth,1  where  now  the  Wear 
and  Tyne  roll  their  polluted  waters  to  the  sea,  and  all  the  land 
lies  under  the  curse  of  smoke  and  the  din  of  forges;  where  then 
the  monks  of  St.  Peter  and  St.  Paul  tilled  their  fields,  and 
their  shepherds  guarded  their  sheep. 

No  warnings  from  agencies  natural  or   supernatural,  from 

Alcuin  or  from  the  fiery  dragons  in  the  sky,  could  serve  to  put 

these  houses  in  a  position  to  defy  the  Vikings.    And  on  Jarrow 

the  pirates  fell  the  year  after  their  attack  on  Lindis- 

A.D.  794.  farne  an(j  burned  it.  The  crew  went  back  to  their 
ship  and  sailed  on  to  Wearmouth.  This  would  next  have  fallen, 
but,  say  the  chroniclers,  St.  Cuthbert  now  revenged  himself  for 
the  desecration  of  his  shrine.  He  sent  a  storm  upon  the  fleet, 
and  the  heathen's  boats,  which  in  these  early  Viking  days  were 
light  craft  enough,  were  driven  ashore  and  wrecked.  Their  leader 
was  killed  in  the  affray  ;  the  crews  were  drowned  or  scattered,  and 
fell  an  easy  prey  to  the  vengeance  of  the  peasantry,  and  the 
vengeance  we  may  be  sure  was  not  mitigated.  We  may  guess 
that  many  were  tortured  and  that  few  escaped.  And  so  it  was 
that  this  attack  upon  the  north  of  England  ceased  almost  as 
suddenly  as  it  had  begun ;  and  despite  the  heavenly  warnings 
the  full  force  of  the  Viking  fury  did  not  fall  upon  England  till 
the  lifetime  of  a  generation  had  passed. 

1  There  is  no  evidence  in  support  of  the  travels  {e.g.,  to  Rome)  ascribed 
by  later  tradition  to  Beda. 


MONKWEARMOUTH,   WALES,  AND  IRELAND,     145 

Next  year,  however,  a  fresh  fleet  appeared  in  a 
fresh  quarter,  in  Glamorganshire.1  The  king  of 
South  Wales  and  his  mountaineers  proved  a  match  for  the  sea- 
rovers,  who,  giving  up  their  attempt  upon  that  country,  set  sail 
across  St.  George's  Channel,  and  for  the  first  time  sighted  the 
coast  of  Ireland—  a  country  destined  for  long  years  to  be  the 
chief  mark  of  their  attacks.  Near  the  coast  of  what  is  now 
Dublin  County,  a  little  to  the  north  of  Dublin  Bay,  lay  a  small 
island  called  Rechru  or  Rechrain,  containing  like  most  of  the 
Irish  islands  its  community  of  monks,  its  shrine  in  the  midst, 
and  its  treasures,  no  doubt,  of  gold  and  jewellery  within  the 
shrine.  It  was  a  monastery  which  owed  its  foundation  to 
Columba  himself,  and  which  had  always  been  a  favourite  with 
the  saint.  The  Viking  fleet,  strong  120  sail,2  warned  perhaps 
by  their  failure  on  the  mainland  of  Glamorganshire  and  the 
previous  failure  at  Monkwearmouth  (if  any  knew  of  that), 
reverted  to  the  tactics  with  which  they  had  begun ;  and  which, 
for  long  years,  generally  marked  their  descent  upon  a  new 
coast.  They  first  of  all  took  possession  of  an  island  which  they 
could  hold  in  security.  In  the  present  case  they  fell  upon  Rechru, 
treating  it  as  they  had  treated  Lindisfarne.  '  There  was  a  burn- 
ing of  the  island  of  Rechrain,  and  horrid  ravage  and  harrying 
to  want  and  desolation.'  3  Then  they  made  a  lodgment  on  the 
island,  using  it  hereafter  as  a  point  d'appui  for  attacks  upon  the 
mainland.  And  the  place  as  it  changed  its  masters  changed 
likewise  its  name.  It  was  Rechru,  a  Celtic  word  of  uncertain 
etymology  ;  it  is  now  Danish,  Lamb- ay — the  Lamb  Island. 

The  plunderers  rejoicing  in  their  new-found  world  of  adven- 
ture, this  unexplored  sea  between  Ireland  and  England,4*  crossed 

1  Gwent.  Chron.  s.a.  795  (Publ.  of  Cambrian  Arch.  Ass.). 

2  War  of  the  Gaedhill,  &c,  iv.  (a.  795,  Todd). 

3  An.  Ult.,  794  (795?);  An.  Four  Masters,  790.  The  dates  of  the 
Irish  Chronicles  arc  often  even  more  wide  of  the  mark  than  the  dates  of 
the  English  Chronicle.  4  Cf.  Ult.  797. 

II 


146  FIRST  CONTESTS. 

back  a  year  or  two  after  to  Man,  or  rather  to  a 
A.D.  798.  jjtt|e  js]an(j  lying  close  beside  the  larger  one  and 
then  called  Innispatrick — St.  Patrick's  isle.1  The  name  was  a 
relic  of  the  early  missionary  labours  of  the  Irish  Church.  Now, 
like  Rechru,  it  had  to  change  it  and  put  on  the  one  which  it 
now  bears — a  name  more  consonant  with  the  changed  times,  a 
Danish  name  in  place  of  a  Celtic  one,  a  name  not  suggestive 
of  peaceful  labours  but  of  war's  alarms,  Holm  Peel — the  island 
of  the  watch  tower. 

In  the  first  years  of  the  ninth  century  the  religious  world  of 

Western  Christendom   suffered  a  new  and  bitter 

blow  by  the  destruction  of  the  monastery  of  Iona. 
Hy  was  first  attacked  in  802  2  apparently  by  a  fleet  which  had 
sailed  up  St.  George's  Channel  and  which,  after  it  had  done 

this  evil  deed,  is  lost  to  our  sight  in  the  far  north. 
A.D.  806.    -gut  jn  gQ£  jt  was  agajn  attacked  3  by  a  fleet — per- 
haps by  the  same  Vikings — southward  bound,  and  with  much 
greater  fury  than  before.     The  whole  monastery  was  destroyed 
and  all  the  monks  were  slain  to  the  number  of  sixty-eight. 

It  was  now  243  years  since  Columba  had  fixed  his  home 
upon  this  little  island,  whence  he  and  his  disciples  had  travelled, 
as  we  have  described  them  travelling,  from  island  to  island  and 
from  shore  to  shore,  founding  fresh  monasteries,  making  fresh 
converts.  Since  then  the  Columban  Church,  and  Hy  with  it, 
had  fallen  greatly  below  their  ancient  renown.  We  have  seen 
in  what  manner  the  former  had  become  a  heretical  church. 
One  by  one  the  children  of  the  Columban  Church,  that  in 
Northumbria,  the  church  of  the  Picts,  had  conformed  to  the 
Roman  practice.     Naitan,  king  of  the  Picts,  dealt  a  heavy  blow 

1  An.  Ult.  ygj,  798.  Todd,  War,  &c,  &c,  Steenstrup,  Normannerne^ 
cf.  Four  M.  793. 

9  F.  M.  797  ;  An.  Ult.  801.    The  date  781  in  Ann.  Inisf.  is  erroneous. 
•  F.  M.  801 ;  An.  Ult.  804. 


ION  A  RAVAGED.  147 

to  Iona  when  on  Scone  Hill,  'the  Hill  of  Belief,' 
he  renounced  his  error  upon  these  points.1  A 
heavier  bl  ,w  still  was  struck  when  Constantine  I.  prepared  to 
transfer  the  mother  church  of  Scotland  from  Hy  to  Dunkeld — 
from  Delos  to  Delphi  as  it  were — in  the  interior  of  the  country.2 
Iona  had  indeed  ere  now  itself  conformed  :  but  grudgingly  and 
too  late.  What  it  had  lost  in  fame  is  shown  by  this.  The 
proper  number  of  monks  even  for  a  moderate  establishment 
was  150.  But  when  this  thrice  famous  Hy  was  destroyed  by 
the  Danes  it  mustered  only  68  coenobites.  This  burning  gave 
to  Iona,  for  a  time,  its  coup  de  grace.  Though  the  Vikings 
carried  off  all  they  could  find  they  left  what  (as  we  may  guess) 
the  Christians  deemed  its  greatest  treasure,  the  remains  of  the 
founder.  But  it  was  felt  that  this  western  island  was  too  exposed 
a  place  to  be  left  any  longer  in  the  possession  of  such  precious 
relics ;  and  the  body  of  Columba  was  carried  to  Kells,  in  Ire- 
land, where  a  stone  church — a  rare  object  in  those  days — was 
built  expressly  to  contain  it.3 

Some  tribute  of  regret  was,  however,  we  may  well  believe, 
paid  to  this  cradle  of  the  Columban  Church — and  is  due  even 
from  us.  The  island  is  described  to  us/  '  In  the  centre  a  plain 
extending  across  it  in  the  narrowest  part  from  the  eastern  to  the 
western  sea,  presenting  apparently  fertile  land  well  adapted  for 
agriculture  or  pasture.  In  the  middle  a  small  green  hillock 
surmounted  by  a  circle  of  stones.  North  of  this  plain,  upon 
the  barren  shore,  a  tract  of  wilder  ground,  consisting  of  small 
grassy  patches  or  dells,  alternating  with  rocky  elevations.  These 
culminate  in  the  highest  elevation  of  the  island  now  called 
Dunii.     And  on  the  north  shore  a  strip  of  low  land,  extending 

1  Beda,  H.  E.  v.  21 ;  Skene,  Celtic  Scotland,  i.  280. 
a  Constantine  began  but  did  not  complete  the  Dunkeld  Church. 
3  The  relics  were  carried  back  to  Iona  a  century  later.   Part  of  Col  urn  ba's 
relics  appear  to  have  been  afterwards  transferred  to  Dunkeld. 
*  Skene,  C.  S.  ii.  89. 


148  FIRST  CONTESTS. 

from  the  base  of  the  hill  to  the  sea  and  terminating  at  the  N.E. 
end  of  the  island  in  a  strip  of  the  purest  white  sand,  the  scene 
of  a  cruel  slaughter  of  the  monks  by  the  Danes.'  l 

Thus  had  the  sea  between  Alban  and  Ireland  become  a 
veritable  corsair's  home.  Many  of  the  atrocities  of  this  time 
are  no  doubt  buried  for  ever  in  oblivion.  For  when  history 
once  more  throws  its  light  upon  the  western  coasts  and  islands 
of  Scotland  we  see  Norsemen  everywhere  settled  in  them,  and 
those  countless  homes  of  the  Columban  monks  have  disap- 
peared. It  is  the  same  in  Ireland.  We  can  but  pick  out  the 
record  of  one  or  two  of  the  numberless  descents  upon  the 
religious  communities.  We  need  not  much  regret  this.  Had 
we  the  full  list  of  the  achievements  of  the  Vikings  it  would 
read  only  like  a  continual  repetition  of  the  same  thing — the 
same  scene  of  rapine  and  slaughter. 

And  now  we  find  the  Vikings  sailing  round  to  the  other  side 

of  Ireland — the  new  Odysseuses — venturing   to   earth's    very 

limits.     A.D.  807,  the  year  after  the  fall  of  Hy,  was 
A  D    807 

the  year  of  the  first  of  their  raids  upon  the  western 

coast  of  Ireland  ;  the  first  time,  too,  that  they  landed  upon  the 

mainland  of  this  country.     The  Vikings  first  plundered  Innish- 

murray,  off  the  Sligo  coast,  and  thence  they  harried  inland  some 

little  way  into  Roscommon  county.     What  may  have  been  the 

thoughts  of  the  dreamy  coenobites  in    these  far  shores    and 

islands  when  the  robbers  from  unknown  quarters  of  the  world 

burst  upon  their  solitudes,  we  can  only  guess.   After  this  fashion, 

unwillingly  enough,  were  they  made  members  of  the  body  of 

Christian  Europe  and  dragged  once  more  into  the  stream  of 

European  politics. 

1  For  a  fuller  description  of  Iona  see  Reeve's  Adamnan,  First  Ed, 


CHARLEMAGNE  AND  THE  DANES,  149 

IV. 

On  the  continent,  meanwhile,  though  Saxony  was  by  no 
means  wholly  subdued,  her  future  struggles  were  sporadic 
and  intermittent ;  and  from  this  time  forward  the  Franks  were 
in  a  position  to  come  into  pretty  close  relationship  with  the 
Danes  upon  their  side  of  the  North  Sea.  Certainly  embassies 
once  or  twice  passed  between  the  two  countries.  But  during 
the  next  two  years  or  so  following  the  baptism  of  Widukind, 
Charlemagne's  attention  was  a  good  deal  called  away  in  other 
directions.  There  were  wars  against  the  Avars ;  a  domestic 
conspiracy  to  put  down  \  finally  there  was  the  position  of  the 
Holy  Father  at  Rome,  which  was  growing  day  by  day  more 
perilous,  between  the  hostility  of  the  Lombard  princes  outside, 
and  treachery  within  his  gates. 

Pope  Leo  III.  who  had  long  been  on  ill  terms  with  the 
partisans  of  the  Lombard  dynasty,  had,  as  was  fondly  believed 
throughout  Frankland,  sus'ained  a  last  proof  of  their  enmity  in 
the  outbreak  of  a  conspiracy  in  his  own  household  which  the 
Lombard  party  was  supposed  to  have  fomented.  During  a 
solemn  ceremonial  in  Rome  certain  relatives  of  the  Pope,  falling 
upon  the  procession  at  the  head  of  which  he  rode,  seized  the 
person  of  Leo,  treated  him  with  every  indignity,  and  finally,  it 
was  said,  they  cut  out  his  tongue  and  put  out  his  eyes.  But 
almost  immediately  after  (such  was  the  belief)  the  Pope's  sight 
and  speech  were  restored  to  him  by  a  miracle.  He  escaped 
from  Italy  and  came  to  throw  himself  upon  the  protection  of 
Charles.  Charles  stood  forth  as  the  champion  of 
Christianity  and  the  protector  of  the  Vicar  of  Christ, 
and  we  know  what  great  event  followed  the  return  of  Charles 
with  the  Pope  into  Italy,  in  the  year  800.  One  incidental 
notice  occurring  in  this  annus  mirabilis  of  the  imperial  coro- 
nation concerns  us  here.     Charles,  we  are  told,  passed  some 


150  FIRST  CONTESTS. 

portion  of  the  year  in  a  visitation  of  the  shores  of  the  Northern 
Ocean  (the  Frisian  islands)  which  pirates  had  been  ravaging 
and  threatening * ;  and  no  doubt  he  made  dispositions  for  the 
defence  of  the  coast  and  the  building  of  a  fleet.  On  this  last 
matter  his  thoughts  had  long  been  turned. 

The  pirate  fleets  were,  we  may  guess,  despatched  by  the 
successor  of  Siegfred,  a  much  more  truculent  and  perhaps 
much  more  powerful  king,  Godfred  (or  Godrod),  who  a  year  or 
two  later  appears  before  us  lying  ready  with  his  fleet  and  army 
at  Sleswick,  while  Charles  was  transporting  the  Saxons  away 
from  their  homes  on  his  border  and  giving  these  lands  to  the 
Abodriti.2  Four  years  later  this  king  declared 
"  "  '  open  war  against  the  Frankish  Emperor,  by  attack- 
ing with  great  determination  the  Abodriti,  the  allies  of  the 
Franks.3  He  compassed  (by  treachery,  says  Einhard)  the 
death  of  Thrasuco  (Drasco),  dux  or  king  of  that  people,  and 
laid  a  part  of  their  land  under  tribute.*  Charles  sent  assistance 
to  his  vassal,  and  part  of  Godfred's  army  was  cut  to  pieces 
during  a  siege  of  one  of  the  Wendish  strongholds  ;  his  nephew 
Reginald  was  slain.  Godfred  expected  that  the  hostility  of  the 
Frankish  Emperor  would  go  further;  for  he  retired  behind 
Schleswig,  and  drew  the  lines  of  a  great  entrenchment,  the 
Danish  dyke,s  across  the  frontiers  of  his  country,  from  the  east 

1  There  is  one  notice  of  a  Viking  attack  on  the  coast  of  Aquitaine  in  799, 
Mon.  Ale,  p.  512,  an  event  for  which  I  confess  I  cannot  account.  See 
Jaffe's  note,  I.e. 

3  In  A.D.  804  Charlemagne  removed  a  portion  of  the  Trans- Albingian 
Saxons  from  their  territories,  and  handed  these  over  to  the  Abodriti, 
who  thus  separated  the  Danes  from  their  old  allies.  Godfred  on  this 
occasion  proposed  a  meeting  between  himself  and  Charlemagne  upon  the 
Elbe,  but  never  appeared.      Einhard,  s.  a.  804. 

'■»  On  the  subject  of  Godfred's  nationality  see  Steenstrup's  Indledn.i  Nor.^ 
p.  68  sqq. 

4  Einhard,  Ann.  ;  Chron.  Moiss.  (P.  i.  303). 

s  Not  the  same  dyke  known  at  a  later  date  as  the  Danish  dyke,  which 
was  constructed  by  Queen  Thyra. 


CHARLEMAGNE  AND  GODFRED.  151 

sea  to  the  lower  Eyder.  Charles,  on  his  part,  we  are  distinctly 
told,  had  formed  the  design  of  attacking  the  Danes  in  their 
own  country.  *  But  whether  it  were  that  Divine  Providence 
was  not  on  our  side,  that  He  might  try  Israel  by  the  hands  of 
these  men,  as  the  Scripture  saith,  or  that  our  sins  rose  up 
against  us ' ■ — all  Charles's  attempts  were  unsuccessful,  and 
finally  he  abandoned  the  enterprise. 

At  this  Godfred,  who  had  not  been  idle,  took  in  his  turn  the 
initiative,  and  despatched,  in  a.d.  810,  against  the 
Frisian  coast  a  fleet  of  two  hundred  sail — by  far  AD'  810' 
the  largest  which  had  been  heard  of  up  till  now.  The  fleet 
ravaged  some  of  the  islands  off  North  Frisia,  landed  a  while 
upon  the  mainland,  and  wrung  from  the  inhabitants  a  payment 
of  one  hundred  pounds  of  silver.  Grown  insolent  at  this  success, 
Godfred  proceeded  farther  to  gather  together  an  army ;  of  this 
he  prepared  to  take  the  lead  in  person,  while  he  proclaimed  to 
Charles  and  to  all  whom  it  might  concern,  that  he  would 
soon  be  heard  of  at  the  gates  of  imperial  Aix-la-Chapelle  (a 
prophecy  which  was  realized  by  another  Godfred  seventy-six 
years  later).  Charles  hurried  up  to  meet  him,  and  fixed  his 
camp  at  the  confluence  of  the  Alar  and  the  Weser.  Godfred, 
on  his  side,  was  upon  the  Saxon  border.2  But  there,  as  the 
Danish  king  was  flying  his  hawks  on  the  banks  of  the  Elbe,  a 
servant  whom  he  had  ill-treated  (or  some  say  a  son  whose 
mother  he  had  deserted),  came  upon  him  unawares,  and  with 
one  blow  severed  his  body  clean  in  two.3     And  with  the  death 

1  Mon.  Sangall.  (Pertz,  ii.  757). 

a  In  the  Mosel  country,  says  the  monk  of  St.  Gall,  confusing  this  Godfred 
with  the  one  who  harassed  the  Mosel  country  seventy  years  later. 

3  Einhard,  Ann.  810.     The  death  of  this  Godfred  is  ascribed  to  Godrod 
the  Yngling. 

Vartf  Goftrod  inn  Gofoglati 
16mi  beittr,  sas  fyr  longo  vas  : 
ok  um  raft  at  olom  stilli 
hofud  heipt  rakt  at  hilmi  dr6  : 


1 52  FIRST  CONTESTS. 

of  this  king  ended  all  present  thought  among  the  Danes  of 
coming  to  an  encounter  with  the  Frankish  army.  Godfred's 
nephew  and  successor,1  Hemming,  withdrew  the  army  far  into 
the  inaccessible  woods  of  Jutland,  and  Charles,  we  are  told, 
shed  tears  at  the  thought  that  his  enemy  had  escaped  him  this 
second  time.  *  Why  was  I  not  deemed  worthy,'  he  cried,  '  to 
see  how  my  Christian  arm  would  have  made  play  with  these 
monkeys  ?  ' 2     The  time  would  come,  if  not  in  his  day. 

And  for  a  contrasted  picture  take  this  other — not,  it  is  true, 
perfectly  authenticated — from  the  monk  of  St.  Gallen. 

'  Once  Charles  arrived  by  chance  at  a  certain  maritime  town 
of  Gallia  Narbonensis.3  While  he  was  sitting  at  dinner,  and 
had  not  been  recognized  by  the  townspeople,  some  northern 
pirates  came  to  carry  on  their  depredations  in  that  very  port. 
When  the  ships  were  perceived  some  thought  they  were  Jewish 
merchants,  some  that  they  were  Africans,  some  Bretons.  But 
the  wise  king,  knowing  from  the  shape  and  swiftness  of  the 
vessels  what  sort  of  crews  they  carried,  said  to  those  about 
him,  "  These  ships  bear  no  merchandize,  but  cruel  foes."    At 

ok  laun-svik  inn  lom-geSi 
Aso  arr  af  jofri  bar  : 
ok  buSlungr  a  beSi  fornom 
Stiflo-sundz  of  stunginn  vas. 
Ynglingatal  restored,  xxvi.     C.  P.  B.  ii.  656.     See  note  3  on  page 
150. 

1  According  to  Saxo  Godfred  was  succeeded  by  Olaf,  Ola  f  by  Hemming. 
Bk.  ix. 

2  '  Cum  cynocephalis  illis.'  Mon.  Sangall,  ii.  13  (Pertz,  ii.  757  ;  Bouquet, 
v.  140). 

3  It  is  certain  that  in  the  days  of  Charlemagne  no  northern  pirates  had 
made  their  way  into  the  Mediterranean.  Either,  therefore,  our  author  (the 
monk  of  St.  Gall)  is  mistaken  about  the  place,  or  (what  is  perhaps  the  most 
reasonable  supposition)  he  has  transferred  to  the  Vikings  a  story  originally 
connected  with  the  Mohammedan  pirates,  whose  depredations  in  Italy  and 
in  the  Gulf  of  Lyons  were  scarcely  less  terrible  than  those  of  the  Vikings  in 
northern  France.  Some  of  these  Corsairs  had  already  been  seen  on  the  coast 
of  Gaul.     Einhard,  Vita.  Car.  I.  i.  17  (Peitzii.). 


EXTENT  OF  VIKING  RAVAGES.  153 

these  words  all  the  Franks  rivalled  each  other  in  the  speed 
with  which  they  rushed  to  attack  the  boats.  But  it  was  useless. 
The  Northmen  hearing  that  there  stood  the  man  whom  they 
were  wont  to  call  Charles  the  Hammer,  were  afraid  lest  all 
their  fleet  should  be  taken  in  the  port,  and  should  be  broken 
in  pieces  ;  and  their  flight  was  so  rapid,  that  they  withdrew 
themselves  not  only  from  the  swords,  but  even  from  the  eyes 
of  those  who  wished  to  catch  them.  The  religious  Charles, 
however,  seized  by  a  holy  fear,  rose  from  the  table,  and  looked 
out  of  the  window  towards  the  East,  remaining  long  in  that 
position,  his  face  bathed  in  tears.  No  one  ventured  to  ques- 
tion him  :  but  turning  to  his  followers  he  s  lid,  "  Know  ye  why 
I  weep  ?  Truly  I  fear  not  that  these  will  injure  me.  But  I  am 
deeply  grieved  that  in  my  lifetime  they  should  have  been  so 
near  landing  on  these  shores,  and  I  am  overwhelmed  with 
sorrow  as  I  look  forward  and  see  what  evils  they  will  bring 
upon  my  offspring  and  their  people.  " '  z 

Under  these  foreshado wings  the  eighth  century  drew  to  a 
close,  and  the  ninth  (that  fatal  era)  opened.  The  Vikings  had 
now  been  seen,  but  not  much  more  than  seen,  upon  most  of 
the  lands  where  in  future  their  ships  would  be  best  known — 

'  Aghast  and  pale, 
From  Ostia's  walls  the  crowd  shall  mark 
The  track  of  thy  destroying  bark, 
Thy  thrice  accursed  sail — ' 

Upon  the  Frisian  coast  (as  we  have  seen) ;  possibly  as  far  south 
as  Aquitaine;  on  the  southern  and  northern  coasts  of  England; 
on  both  sides  of  St.  George's  Channel.  But  there  was  not  much 
as  yet  to  attract  the  attention  of  Europe  at  large,  still  less  to 
cause  serious  alarm.  We  might  compare  signs  such  as  these 
to  the  riots  which   precede  a  revolution— of  no  moment,   of 

1  Mon.  Sangall,  ii.  14. 


154  FIRST  CONTESTS. 

infinite  moment,  to  the  careless  and  unprepared.  For  the 
present  the  central  state  of  Christendom  was  held  in  the  strong 
grasp  of  Charles  the  Great;  could  it  but  remain  so!  But  the 
emperor  only  outlived  his  truculent  foe  King  Godfred  four 
years,  dying  in  a.d.  814. 

Howbeit,  though  this  new  storm  of  invasion  from  the  North 
seemed  already  to  have  begun  to  blow  round  almost  every 
coast,  the  clouds  for  a  while  gathered  themselves  together 
again,  and  leaving  the  other  countries  of  Europe,  drifted  over 
westward,  and  fell  with  all  their  fury  upon  Ireland.  The  awful 
prophecy  contained  in  the  fiery  dragons  and  the  rain  of  blood 
was  not  fulfilled,  at  leist  not  yet ;  for  the  space  of  another 
generation  England  was  left  almost  at  peace. 


CHAPTER  V. 
CHARACTER  OF  THE  VIKINGS. 


On  both  sides  of  Europe,  as  we  see,  the  Scandinavian  people 
were  beginning  to  make  themselves  known ;  on  the  East  be- 
cause the  Empire  of  Christendom  had  once  more  advanced  to 
their  borders,  on  the  West  because  they  had  now  brought  their 
art  of  navigation  to  a  higher  perfection. 

And  here  we  have  occasion  to  note  how  slow  working  are 
the  events  and  the  forces  which  mould  our  history,  how  true  is 
that  classical  image  of  Fate  or  Nemesis  advancing  pede  claudo. 
The  northern  nations  had  learned  the  use  of  the  sail  from  the 
Romans  :  their  word  seg/,  like  our  sat'/,  and  all  Teutonic  names 
for  the  same  thing,  from  the  Latin  sagulum.  This  use  of  the 
sail  they  had  learnt,  it  seems  probable,  very  early  in  the  Chris- 
tian era ;  not  in  the  days  of  Tacitus,  for  he  says  expressly  that 
the  ships  of  the  Suiones  had  no  sails,  but  soon  after.  Yet  it 
was  only  now  in  the  eighth  century  that  the  full  effect  of  this 
discovery  came  to  light.  The  Scandinavians  had,  as  we  saw, 
preserved  their  art  of  boat-building,  little  changed,  since  far 
pre-historic  days,  the  days  of  the  hallristningar. 

Even   now   the   conservativeness  of  ancient    habit   fought 


156  CHARACTER  OF  THE  VIKINGS. 

against  the  spirit  of  change  in  them,  and  the  general  construc- 
tion of  their  boats  remained  what  it  had  long  been  ;  that  is  to 
say,  they  were  admirably  fitted  for  the  comparatively  safe 
navigation  of  the  Baltic,  but  to  our  modern  notions  very 
unseaworthy. 

The  history  of  boat-building  in  the  North,  subsequent  to  the 
days  of  Tacitus,  is  scantily  preserved  by  one  or  two  discoveries 
of  buried  craft.  One  found  in  Nydams  moos,  in  Denmark, 
belongs  to  a  period  earlier  than  the  outbreak  of  the  Viking 
age.1  Two  others  found  near  Christiania,  and  now  preserved 
in  the  Christiania  museum,  are  of  a  later  date,  probably  of  the 
eleventh  century.2  The  best  preserved  of  these,  the  Gokstad 
ship,  has  been  used  as  a  burial  ship ;  that  is  to  say,  the  body 
of  a  dead  warrior  has  been  placed  therein  for  burial.  This 
custom  of  using  ships  as  a  kind  of  immense  coffins  long  pre- 
vailed among  the  Scandinavian  nations ;  it  prevailed  not  only 
in  the  days  when  they  buried  their  dead,  but  earlier  in  days 
when  they  burned  them.  An  Arab  merchant  who  travelled  in 
Novgorod,  or  Gardariki,  as  the  Scandinavians  called  it,  in 
the  tenth  century — in  days,  that  is  to  say,  when  that  country 
was  a  Scandinavian  (Swedish)  kingdom — has  left  us  a  curious 
description  of  the  funeral  rites  of  these  people.  They  always 
burned  their  dead;  but  the  body  was  first  placed  in  a  boat 
made  for  the  purpose. 3 

We  cannot  tell  whether  or  no  the  Gokstad  boat  was  made 
only  for  purposes  of  funeral ;  but  it  was  more  probably  an  old 
sea-going  vessel.  Like  the  boats  of  the  stone-carvings,  like  the 
boats  of  Tacitus's  Suiones,  it  was  built  alike  at  both  ends,  so 
that  it  could,  as  Tacitus  says  of  the  earlier  northern  craft,  be 
propelled  with  equal  ease  in  either  direction.     What  we  notice 

1  Montelius,  Kultur  Schwedens  in  vorhistorischer  Zeit,  p.  no. 

2  One  found  at  Tune,  one  at  Gokstad,  both  in  the  Christiania  museum. 

3  Ibn  Haukal,  Kitab  el  Mashdlik  wa-l  Memdlik  (Book  of  Roads  and 
Kingdoms)  [Tr.  by  Ouseley]. 


VIKING  SHIPS.  157 

most  about  the  build  of  the  Christiania  boats — and  the  same 
may  be  said  of  the  Nydam  boat  so  far  as  we  can  tell — is  that 
they  were  very  shallow.  We  see,  in  fact,  that  they  had  followed 
the  old  tradition.  The  Gokstad  ship  is  seventy-five  feet  in 
length  and  sixty  feet  along  the  keel.  Her  greatest  breadth  of 
beam  is  fifteen  feet ;  but  this  narrows  away  towards  either 
end.  Her  depth  at  the  broadest  part  is  little  more  than  three 
and  a  half  feet.  Such  vessels  were  admirably  fitted  to  run  in 
and  out  of  creeks  and  bays  :  they  were,  par  excellence^  vik  boats 
(wick-boats)  as  well  as  Viking  boats.  They  had  no  fixed 
steering-gear,  but,  like  the  modern  whaling-boat,  could  be 
steered  by  an  oar  from  the  side — the  star-board  or  steer- 
board.  In  the  creeks  and  small  bays,  through  narrow  channels 
and  up  rivers,  the  boats  would  pass  or  lie  snug,  often  quite 
unperceived  by  the  landsmen  close  at  hand ;  and  the  North- 
men could  choose  their  own  moment  for  a  raid  upon  the 
inhabitants.  We  must  suppose  that  the  earlier  Viking  boats 
were  smaller  than  those  of  which  we  hear  descriptions  in  the 
Sagas,  or  than  the  Christiania  boats.  In  the  Sagas  we  read  of 
vessels  having  thirty  benches  of  rowers  (sixty  rowers  in  all),  or 
of  a  still  greater  number.  Still,  even  in  Saga  days  fifteen  seats 
seems  to  have  been  a  good  average  number  for  a  '  long  ship.'1 
The  Gokstad  ship  had  sixteen  oars  a-side.  We  may  take  it 
that  this  is  about  the  extreme  number  for  a  Viking  ship  in  the 
earlier  days.  I  have  spoken  of  benches  of  rowers  ;  but  it  must 
be  confessed  that  in  the  Christiania  ship  no  traces  of  seats  have 
been  found,  and  it  would  seem  that  in  it  the  men  rowed 
standing.  Taking  two  men  to  relieve  each  other  at  each  oar, 
we  should  get  sixty  men  at  least  in  these  ships.  It  is  quite 
likely  that  the  fighting  men  in  a  ship  outnumbered  those  at  any 

1  In  the  later  Saga  age  there  were  apparently  in  use  two  sorts  of  ships. 
'long  ships'  for  coast  or  genuine  'wick'  service,  and  a  stronger  sort  of 
sea-going  vessel.  We  may  be  pretty  sure  that  the  '  long  ship  '  of  those 
times  is  the  best  representative  of  the  Viking  ship  of  our  earlier  period. 


158  CHARACTER  OF  THE  VIKINGS. 

moment  engaged  in  rowing  by  at  least  three  to  one,  which 
would  give  not  less  than  120  men  to  a  vessel  of  the  size  of  the 
Christiania  boat.  In  the  Saga  of  Olaf  the  Saint,  for  example, 
a  *  long  ship '  of  thirty-two  benches  is  spoken  of  as  containing 
two  hundred  men.  But  it  has  been  already  said  that  when  we 
hear  in  the  early  Viking  days  of  a  considerable  fleet,  we  are  not 
to  multiply  the  number  of  ships  mentioned  by  another  100  or 
120.  Undoubtedly  the  great  majority  of  the  craft  in  early 
times  were  quite  small  boats,  with  nothing  like  the  thirty-two 
oars  of  the  Gokstad  ship. 

We  have  said  that  these  boats  were,  taken  as  a  whole,  not 
very  seaworthy ;  and  that  they  were  essentially  rowing  boats, 
not  sailing  boats,  and  in  this  respect  resembled  the  ships  of 
antiquity.  We  scarcely  ever  hear,  even  in  the  later  Viking  age, 
of  double  ranks  of  rowers,  such  as  those  from  which  the 
biremes  got  their  names,  and  never  of  triple  ranks.  Neither 
biremes  nor  triremes,  we  may  be  pretty  sure,  were  known  in 
Viking  ship-building  during  our  period.  The  mast  was  a  mere 
adjunct,  with  all  the  appearance  of  an  addition  to  the  original 
plan,  very  often  but  ill-supported  by  the  light-built  ship.  There 
was  never  more  than  one  mast  to  a  vessel.  It  carried  one 
heavy  cross-beam,  with  a  single  large  square  sail.  The  mast 
could  easily  be  lowered,  and  generally  was  so  before  an 
engagement;  at  such  a  time,  therefore,  all  the  manoeuvring 
was  done  by  the  rowers. 

We  must  not,  then,  in  picturing  the  ships  of  the  northern 
sea-rovers,  think  of  those  craft  which  we  now  see,  generally 
laden  with  wood,  sailing  about  the  coast  of  Norway.  These 
are  heavy  vessels  with  square  sterns.  But  we  must  think 
rather  of  the  shallow  boats,  pointed  at  each  end,  which  are 
rowed  about  the  lakes,  adding  to  them  high,  curved  prows  and 
stern-posts,  and  sails.  The  last  were  probably  like  the  fine 
square  sails  of  the  modern  sailing  craft,  which,  though  they 


VIKING  SHIPS.  159 

have  not  the  beauty  of  the  bird-like  felucca  sail,  have  a  certain 
grandeur,  a  certain  impressiveness  indescribable  to  those  who 
have  never  seen  them  coming  slowly  round  some  headland  or 
appearing  above  some  low  island  on  the  Norway  coast.  The 
high  prows  of  the  Viking  ships  were  carved  into  the  shape  of  a 
fantastic  animal,  most  often  into  the  likeness  of  a  dragon  or 
worm.  The  most  famous  among  such  ships  in  Scandinavian 
history  was  the  ship  of  Olaf  Tryggvesson,  called  The  Long 
Worm.  But  in  fact  this  device  was  so  common  that  the 
expression  '  dragon-ship '  is  in  Old  Norse  literature  almost 
convertible  with  '  war-ship.' 

Even  to  us  a  ship  seems  more  alive  than  any  other  thing 
that  is  not  really  so ;  the  last  traces  of  the  mythopceic  spirit 
linger  in  the  mouth  of  sailors  when  they  talk  about  their  ships. 
What,  then,  must  have  been  the  feeling  in  days  when  the 
mythopceic  spirit  was  very  far  from  dead  ?  Must  not  the 
dragon-ship,  with  its  white  wings  spread,  have  been  to  the 
Norseman  really  a  living  thing,  really  a  mythic  animal,  with 
powers  of  its  own  ?  And  what,  too,  may  have  been  to  the 
Christians  these  war-ships,  whose  coming  was  foretold  by 
terrible  signs  and  fiery  shapes  careering  through  the  air  ?  x 

II. 

In  the  days  of  Tacitus  the  Northern  nations  were  scarcely 
distinguishable  from  their  Teuton  brethren  on  the  Continent ; 
that  is  to  say,  they  were  not  distinguishable  from  the  Teutons 
of  the  Eastern  Baltic — the  Goths,  for  example,  who  lived  at 
the  mouth  of  the  Vistula.2  But  the  Goths  and  the  other 
Germans  had  long  ago  disappeared  from  North-east  Germany ; 

1  Human  sacrifice  was  made  either  to  the  ship  itself  or  to  some  divinity 
when  the  boat  was  launched,  by  binding  the  victims  to  the  rollers  over 
which  ran  the  keel.  It  was  called  'hlunnrod"  (the  roller-reddening).  Cf. 
C.  P.  B.  i.  410,  ii.  349.  2  See  above,  p.  18,  note  I,  and  p.  80,  note '. 


160  CHARACTER  OF  THE  VIKINGS. 

and  by  this  time  the  Scandinavians  had  acquired  a  separate 

speech  and  an  individual  character.     It  becomes  necessary, 

therefore,  for    us    to   ask,   What    was    the    character    of  this 

race,  with  which  Christendom  had   now  begun  a  more  than 

hundred  years'  war  ?     Once  had  the  voice  of  a 
A.D.  circ.  695.   ^.    .     .       J       .     .  ,  ,  ,  ., 

Christian    missionary    been    heard    among    the 

woods  of  Denmark  ;  once,  and  had  then  grown  silent.  Once 
had  a  Danish  king  adventured  into  the  Northern  Ocean  and 
sailed  round  to  the  mouth  of  the  Meuse.  Some  little  com- 
merce doubtless  there  was  between  Denmark  and  Frisia; 
but  intercourse  of  no  kind  sufficient  to  seriously  affect  the 
knowledge  or  the  ignorance  of  Christendom  touching  the  Scan- 
dinavians. Of  the  Vikings'  beliefs  we  need  not  speak  in  this 
place.  Those  that  they  retained  were  no  doubt  in  the  main  the 
beliefs  of  the  Old  Teutons,  such  as  we  have  already  attempted 
to  sketch  them.  The  Scandinavian  creed  as  a  whole  found 
literary  expression  at  a  date  later  than  that  to  which  our 
present  history  stretches.  It  will  be  best  not  to  speak  of 
that  until  we  come  to  the  period  of  its  creation.  But  of  the 
personal  character  of  the  Norsemen  it  is  advisable  to  say 
something. 

We  should  have,  it  is  to  be  feared,  to  eliminate  the  milder 
elements  which  after  a  century  of  contact  with  Christian 
Europe  have  crept  into  the  character  of  the  Viking  hero,  as 
he  appears  in  the  heroic  ballads  of  the  North.  Still,  we  must 
not  think  of  him  as  we  do  of  the  modern  filibuster — the 
worst  offspring  of  a  higher  civilization.  Corruptio  optimi 
pessima  :  the  Viking  was  no  worse  and  no  better  than  the 
society  from  which  he  sprang.  Of  his  courage  not  much 
needs  to  be  told.  Yet  we  cannot  easily  realize  how  all- 
embracing  that  courage  was.  A  trained  soldier  is  often 
afraid  at  sea,  a  trained  sailor  lost  if  he  has  not  the  protect- 
ing sense  of  his  own  ship  beneath  him.     The  Viking  ventured 


VIKING  COURAGE.  161 

upon  unknown  waters  in  ships  very  ill-fitted  for  their  work.  He 
had  all  the  spirit  of  adventure  of  a  Drake  or  a  Hawkins,  all 
the  trained  valour  and  reliance  upon  his  comrades  that  mark 
a  soldiery  fighting  a  militia  —  that  of  Csesar's  legionaries  in 
the  Gauls,  or  Alva's  troops  in  the  Low  Countries.  There  are 
some  manoeuvres  which  a  semi-savage  valour  seems  better 
capable  of  executing  than  the  best  trained  of  modern  armies. 
The  Vikings  preserved  and  improved  upon  a  manoeuvre  in 
favour  with  the  ancient  Germans,1  in  a  way  that  illustrates 
very  forcibly  the  fineness  of  their  quality  as  soldiers.  This 
manoeuvre  was  the  sham  flight.  When  all  day  long  they  had 
been  in  vain  attacking  the  serried  ranks  of  their  adversaries, 
they  would  at  a  preconcerted  signal  take  to  flight.  Their 
opponents  rarely  failed  to  follow  them ;  and  when  they  had 
thus  been  drawn  from  their  position,  the  Northmen  rallied 
again  and  charged  them  into  destruction.  I  think  any  general 
would  admit  that  there  have  been  but  few  disciplined  armies 
in  the  world's  history  which  could  be  trusted  to  execute  such  a 
manoeuvre  as  this;  that  with  the  vast  majority  of  troops  the 
signal  to  retreat  in  the  face  of  an  enemy  would  be  fatal  to  the 
hopes  of  the  day,  even  though  the  reasons  for  that  retreat  were 
well  understood.  And  yet  this  sham  flight  became  almost  a 
special  '  note  '  of  the  Viking  battle.  It  was  practised  with  suc- 
cess before  York  in  a.d.  867  ;  in  Lincolnshire,  near  Kesteven, 
three  years  later ;  and  in  the  battle  of  Wilton  two  years  later 
again  (a.d.  872).  The  same  sham  flight  or  something  like  it 
caused  the  death  in  France  of  France's  bravest  defender, 
Robert  the  Strong;  and  two  hundred  years  afterwards  the  same 
manoeuvre,  put  in  practice  by  he  descendants  of  these  same 
Vikings,  proved  fatal  to  the  old  English  monarchy  at  Hastings.2 

1  Cf.  Germania,  c.  6. 

3  For  another  (traditional)  example  cf.  Dudo,  De  mor.  et  act.  pr.  ducum 
Arormanniay  ii.  4. 

12 


1 62  CHARACTER  OF  THE  VIKINGS. 

They  were  as  valiant  in  defence  as  in  attack.  When  hardest 
pressed  they  set  up  the  impregnable  wall  of  the  shield-burg 
(skjaldborg),  which  was  a  formation  to  be  compared  to  the 
English  square  at  Waterloo,  only  it  was  circular  and  not 
square;  a  sort  of  low  tower  of  men  holding  their  shields  before 
them,  overlapping  as  with  the  Roman  testudo;  some  men,  there- 
fore, it  is  to  be  presumed,  kneeling,  some  standing  above  them. 

What  makes  the  military  achievements  of  the  Vikings  the 
more  remarkable  is  that  they  were  not  organized  by  any  des- 
potic power  above  ;  they  lived  under  a  constitution  which  was 
more  republican  than  monarchic.  Their  leader  was  generally 
called  a  king,  but  was  frequently  one  only  in  name — 

Solo  rex  verbo,  sociis  tamen  imperitabat  x — 

as  a  wretched  poet  of  these  days  sings.  Sometimes  if  he 
ordered  an  attack,  sometimes  if  he  ordered  the  raising  of  a 
siege,  they  refused  to  obey.  Nevertheless,  they  had  the 
wisdom  to  impose  upon  themselves  a  tolerably  strict  camp-law, 
and,  we  must  believe,  lived  in  general  obedience  thereto.2 

With  this  indomitable  courage  went  the  darker  vices  of  a 
half-savage  warlike  people :  a  cruelty,  or  at  least  a  carelessness  of 
life,  which  spared  no  age  nor  sex.  One  of  the  Viking  leaders 
got  the  nickname  of  Born  (Child),  because  he  had  been  so  tender- 
hearted as  to  try  and  stop  the  sport  of  his  followers,  who  were 
tossing  young  children  in  the  air  and  catching  them  upon 
their  spears.  No  doubt  his  men  laughed  not  unkindly  at  this 
fancy  of  his,  and  gave  him  the  nickname  above  mentioned. 
For  all  this  the  Northmen  do  not  seem  as  a  rule  to  have  em- 
ployed torture,  though  they  certainly  did  so  at  times  ;    for  on 

Abbo,  Bel.  Par.  urbis,  v.  37  ;   cf.  Dudo,  0.  c.  i.  II. 
9  On  the  Law  named  after  Frode  Frodegod,  see  Steenstrup,  Normannerne^ 
i.  30  sqq. ,  and  York-Powell,  Grimm  Centenary,  vii.     The  fragment  pre- 
served of  this  law  is  in  Saxo,  Hist.  Dan.  pp.  225-230,  (Midler). 


HUMOUR.  163 

one  occasion  we  read  of  their  impaling  a  number  of  their 
hostages — that  most  terrible  of  all  forms  of  torture,  and,  alas ! 
one  of  the  commonest  in  history.  One  barbarous  method  of 
execution  is  said  to  have  been  invented  in  the  north — the 
blood-eagle, x  or  spread-eagle:  it  meant  the  severing  of  a  man's 
ribs  from  the  backbone  by  blows  of  a  hatchet, .  and  other 
tortures  needless  to  describe,  but  such  as  the  victim  could  not 
have  live  d  under  for  more  than  a  minute.2  Like  most  half- 
savages,  the  Vikings  knew  towards  their  enemies  no  honour- 
able code ;  they  were  as  treacherous  and  deceitful  as  they  were 
brave  and  cruel. 

But  along  with  these  fierce  qualities  there  went  another,  very 
characteristic  of  the  Northman,  a  vivid  sense  of  humour. 
The  Vikings  and  the  Saga  heroes  had  a  schoolboy  love  of  two 
things — nicknames  and  practical  jokes.  These  nicknaming 
habits  of  the  Scandinavian  people  were  peculiar.  All  the  early 
kings  of  Denmark,  for  instance,  down  to  the  fourteenth  century, 
had  their  nicknames,  sometimes  personally  characteristic  only, 
as  Harald  Blue-tooth,  or  Svend  Fork-beard,  Eric  Eye-good, 
Eric  Clipping  ('  Blinking'  Eric)  ;  at  other  times  morally  cha- 
racteristic, as  Erik  Menved,  'But'  Eric,  Eric  with  the  'but,'  or 
Eric  Lam  (Lamb),  Erik  Emun,  ('Bragging'  Eric),  or  Olaf 
Hunger  ('Famine'  Olaf).  All  royal  lines  have  had  some  such 
soubriquets  applied  to  their  members ;  and  of  course  the  art  of 
nicknaming  is  but  the  art  of  naming.  Yet  we  see  a  great 
difference  in  comparing  the  Scandinavian  wealth  in  nicknames 
with  the  paucity  of  other  countries — and  there  is  a  difference  in 
the  character,  too.     One  of   our  best  royal   nicknames,  and 

1  Blodorn. 

2  The  most  famous  instance  of  the  infliction  of  this  punishment,  the 
spread-eagle  cut  by  Torf  Einar  on  Halfdan  Halcgg,  Harald  Fairhair's  son, 
is  no  doubt  apocryphal.  The  passage  of  the  Orkneyinga  (Vigfusson,  O.  S. 
p.  8,  Rolls  Ser.)  in  which  this  punishment  is  mentioned,  suggests  that  it  was 
a  form  of  sacrifice. 


1 64  CHARACTER  OF  THE  VIKINGS. 

quite  in  the  Scandinavian  vein,  was  John  Lackland.  Robert 
Courthose,  is  another  of  a  simpler  sort.  But  Geoffrey  or  Henry 
Plantagenet,  William  the  Lion  of  Scotland,  Henry  the  Lion  of 
Germany — their  soubriquets  are  mere  heraldic  names,  taken 
from  the  badges  on  their  helmets ;  and  they  show  a  lack  in 
ancy  and  in  quickness  on  the  part  of  those  who  gave  them. 
Henry  the  Fowler  is  not  much  better.  One  nickname,  the 
best  ever  bestowed  upon  a  monarch,  is  German,  and  charac- 
teristically German :  '  Der  Winter  Konig,'  (The  Winter  King). 
It  has  a  humour  of  its  own — a  poetic,  quasi-tragic  humour  like 
that  of  Goethe  and  Heine.  It  is,  however,  toto  divisum  orbe 
from  the  soubriquets  of  the  Scandinavian  kind. 

The  love  of  the  northeners  for  practical  jokes  and  the 
character  of  these  practical  jokes  are  amazing.  A  story  told 
in  the  Jomsburg  Viking  Saga  of  the  execution  of  a  number  of 
the  Jomsburg  Vikings,  who  had  been  captured  by  Earl  Hakon, 
is  a  good  instance.  All  the  Jomsburg  Vikings  are  described 
sitting  on  a  log  with  their  feet  bound  to  it.  One  after  another 
was  beheaded  there  where  he  sat,  without  flinching,  without 
winking,  so  the  story  says.  At  last  the  executioner  came  to 
one  of  them,  Sigurd  Buisson,  who  had  very  long  and 
beautiful  hair.  As  his  turn  came  he  cried  out,  'I  fear  not 
death.  But  let  no  slave  touch  my  hair,  nor  blood  defile  it.' 
So  that  one  of  the  Norse  men-at-arms  stepped  forward  and  held 
up  his  hair  till  the  axe  should  fall.  But  Sigurd  gave  a  sudden 
jerk  and  the  axe  fell,  not  on  his  neck,  but  on  the  Norseman's 
wrists,  cutting  off  both  his  hands.  This  trick  so  delighted  Eric, 
the  son  of  Earl  Hakon,  that  he  obtained  the  reprieve  of  all  the 
remaining  Jomsburgers.  There  is  another  story,  well  enough 
known,  of  how  king  ^Ethelstan  sent  a  sword  as  a  present  to 
Harald  Haarfagr, T  and  when   Harald  took  it  the  ambassador 

1  If  this  is  our  /Ethelstan,  Edward's  son,  then  we  must  perforce  bring 
down  the  date  of  Harald  Fairhair  some  thirty  years,  as  Vigfusson  has  done 


HUMOUR.  165 

called  out,  'Ah,  now  thou  hast  taken  a  sword  from  yEthelstan, 
and  art  become  his  man.'  A  few  years  after  Harald  dis- 
patched one  of  his  earls  with  his  own  young  child  Hakon, 
with  orders  to  place  the  boy  upon  ^thelstan's  knees.  When 
the  earl  had  succeeded  in  doing  this  he  called  out,  '  Now  thou 
art  become  my  king's  man,  for  thou  hast  received  his  child  to 
foster.'  And  Harald  would  rather  have  had  his  child  killed  by 
^Ethelstan  than  that  the  earl  should  have  taken  him  back  and 
spoilt  the  practical  joke. 

I  do  not  know  where  we  should  find  a  modern  parallel  to 
such  a  character  as  I  have  described,  unless  it  were  in  the 
Western  States  of  America.  There  we  should  see  the  same 
recklessness,  the  same  stoicism,  something  of  the  same  rude 
magnanimity;  we  should  find  a  code  of  honour,  if  not  as  strict, 
certainly  as  fantastic  as  the  Viking's ;  and  finally  we  should 
find  a  grim  humour  almost  the  exact  counterpart  of  his. 

Some  writers,  reluctant  to  look  upon  the  Vikings,  who  had 
so  much  potential  nobility  in  them,  as  mere  pirates,  have  tried 
to  bestow  on  their  raids  almost  the  character  of  a  crusade — 
or  anti-crusade.  It  seems  tempting  to  believe  that,  as  Charles's 
Saxon  War  may  undoubtedly  be  reckoned  the  first  crusade,  so 
these  Viking  raids,  which  begin  before  that  is  over,  are  the  reply 
of  Heathendom  thereto.  'You  convert  by  fire  and  sword?  we, 
too,  can  do  something  in  that  line.'  I  will  not  say  that  there 
may  not  have  mingled  this  element  in  the  first  attacks  of  the 
Northmen — unconsciously;  that  the  advance  of  Charles  upon 
the  Baltic  shores  may  not  have  stirred  the  Scandinavian  nations 
almost  involuntarily  to  undertake  their  new  adventures. 

There  was  no  other  element  of  religious  war  than   this  un- 

(C.  P.  B.  ii.  487).  Unfortunately  his  argument  is  largely  based  on  the 
assumption  that  it  could  be  no  other  /Ethelstan  ;  and  Guthorm-zEthelstm 
would  suit  the  facts  better  in  many  ways  than  Edward's  son.  There  still 
remain,  however,  weighty  facts  which  support  Vigfusson's  chronology. 


1 66  CHARACTER  OF  THE  VIKINGS. 

conscious  one  in  the  Viking  attacks.  On  the  whole  they  were 
only  plundering  expeditions,  with  scarcely  any  other  conscious 
object  at  the  outset  than  the  amassing  of  treasure.  Later  on, 
when  the  weakness  of  the  Christian  states  became  more 
apparent,  thoughts  of  conquest  and  settlement  supervened: 
ihoughts  of  conquest  first,  which  finally  quieted  down  to 
thoughts  of  settlement. 

But,  on  the  other  hand,  the  amassing  of  treasure  had,  for  the 
Viking,  a  half-religious  character  which  it  is  impossible  for  us 
in  these  days  to  understand.  Between  their  days  and  ours  the 
Feudal  Age  has  intervened;  feudalism  rested  all  claim  to  dignity 
and  nobility  upon  the  possession  of  land,  which  even  to  this 
day  seems  to  most  of  the  nations  once  feudal  a  possession  of 
quite  a  different  kind  from  any  other,  whereas  the  amassing  of 
specie,  which  is  the  work  of  the  trading  classes,  is  accounted 
vulgar  by  comparison.  (I  suppose  among  the  Jews,  who  have 
never  had  any  part  in  feudalism,  no  shadow  of  this  feeling 
exists  ;  and  that  it  is  here  that  the  fundamental  difference 
between  our  way  of  looking  at  things  and  theirs  makes  itself 
felt.) 

But  with  all  the  nations  who  took  part  in  the  invasion  of  the 
Roman  world — and  even  with  those  who  stayed  behind,  but  by 
sympathy  shared  in  the  adventures  of  their  brethren — the 
idea  for  ever  before  their  minds  was  of  the  treasure  which  was 
amassed  somewhere  in  these  lands — the  treasure  in  gold. 
Volumes,  we  know,  might  be  written  of  the  wonderful  part 
which  the  yellow  metal  has  played  in  the  history  of  the  world. 
The  Northmen  themselves  appear  to  have  had  some  strange 
myth  which  represented  gold  as  a  witch-woman  whom  the  gods 
sought  to  burn,  only  with  the  effect  (of  course)  of  refining  the 
gold  and  making  it  more  attractive  and  powerful.1     All  modern 

1  Voluspa  21  (Bugge).  I  am  aware  that  Rydberg  does  not  accept  this 
interpretation.      T.  M.  §§  34-5. 


THIRST  FOR  TREASURE.  167 

instances,  as  of  the  Spanish  conquerors  or  of  the  English 
buccaneers  (the  descendants  of  the  Vikings),  would  give  a  very 
inadequate  notion  of  the  effect  of  this  treasure-seeking  upon 
the  Vikings  themselves. 

In  the  Middle  Ages  the  Prince  or  Nobleman  is  the  Land 
owner,  Land-lord..  As  a  King,  he  is  King  of  the  territory,  not 
of  the  people — King  of  England,  King  of  France,  only  Roi  des 
Francais  in  virtue  of  the  Revolution.  In  the  early  days  of 
Teuton  conquest  he  was  King  of  the  Goths,  of  the  Franks,  of 
the  Burgundians,  of  the  Ring-Danes;  and  his  character  was  ex- 
pressed, at  any  rate  in  the  north,  by  the  name  Ring-breaker, 
i.e.  treasure-dispenser,  (A.S.  Beagabrytta,  O.N.  Baugbrota  or 
Hringbrota);  his  personal  fame  and  power  depended  chiefly 
upon  the  bands  of  Gesellen  who  accompanied  him,  who  fed  at 
his  table,  and  who  were  attracted  to  his  service  by  the  treasure 
of  which  he  had  the  disposal. 

The  Cosmology  of  the  Edda  gives  an  important  place  to 
the  treasures  of  metal  under  the  earth.  Mimir,  the  king  of 
wisdom  and  of  inspiration  [Mimir's  draught],  is  also  Hoddmimir 
or  Treasure-Mimir,  the  guardian  of  the  hidden  wealth  of  the 
world. 

The  whole  plot  of  the  Niebelurigen  legend  turns  on  the 
possession  of  a  mighty  treasure  whose  acquisition  is  invested 
with  the  character  of  a  religious  duty,  calling  for  the  most 
heroic  sacrifices.  This  was  the  feeling  which  moved  men  at 
the  time  when  the  Nibelungen  legend  was  born.  And  for  the 
same  feeling  we  could  hardly  discover  finer  expression  than  in 
those  lines  at  the  end  of  Beowulf y  where  the  hero  thanks  the 
Lord  of  Power  for  allowing  him  to  crown  his  heroic  life  by  the 
acquirement  of  the  great  treasure — 


Ic  J>ara  fraetwa  frean  ealles  J>anc, 
Wuldurcyninge  wordum  ssecge, 


168  CHARACTER  OF  THE  VIKINGS. 

pas  )>ze  ic  moste  mi'num  leodum, 
JEr  swylt  dsege  swylc  gestrynan.1 

The  unbounded  enthusiasm  for  battle  and  adventure  which 
accompanied  this  life  of  treasure-seeking,  which  breathes  in 
every  line  of  the  Eddie  poetry,  and  which  was  in  itself  a  kind 
of  religion,  is  inexpressible  by  words.  The  Christian  chroniclers 
give  us  the  facts  of  the  Viking  raids — for  this  early  period,  they 
alone.  But  for  the  feelings  which  accompanied  the  adventurers 
we  must  turn  to  the  native  literature  of  the  north,  in  which  the 
old  spirit  fully  survives.  In  these  poems,  and  in  them  only, 
the  scene  of  battle  seems  to  take  shape,  and  there  is  a  wild 
magnificence  in  the  picture  that  rises  before  our  eyes. 

We  see  the  dragon  ships  with  grinning  heads  cleaving  their 
way  through  the  water,  churning  it  up  with  their  tarred  oars. 
If  near  the  shadow  of  the  land  the  boat  is  followed,  perhaps,  by 
a  friendly  troop  of  ravens,  ready  to  make  their  account  in  the 
coming  slaughter.  This  bird  the  Northmen  have  taken  for  the 
symbol  of  their  'war- wagers,'  and  use  for  their  banner;  and 
here  and  there  a  wise  man  among  the  crew,  who  has  learnt  the 
language  of  birds,  hears  the  ravens  (like  the  'Twa  Corbies'  of 
the  Scottish  ballad)  telling  each  other  where  the  enemy  are  and 
where  the  thickest  of  the  fight  and  the  greatest  slaughter  will 
be.  Or,  maybe,  far  overhead  rides  a  flock  of  wild  swans,  in 
which  the  eye  of  faith  discerns  the  bright  warlike  shield-maidens 
of  Odin — the  spae-women,  or  Norns,  as  they  are  called  some- 
times— who  weave  the  web  of  victory  and  defeat. 

Vindom,  vindom  vef  darraoar, 
Wind  we,  wind  we  the  web  of  darts. 


1  For  this  treasure  I,  thanks  to  the  Lord  of  All, 
To  the  King  of  Glory  in  words  express, 
These  that  I  might  for  my  people, 
Ere  my  death-day  thus  acquire.    Beoivulf,  1.  2794  sqq. 
We  remember,  too,  how  Frode's  mill  ground  Gold,  Peace,  and  Happiness 
for  the  world.     Grotakv. 


LOVE  OF  CARNAGE.  169 

'The  web  is  woven  of  the  guts  of  men  and  weighed  down 
with  human  heads.  There  are  blood-stained  darts  to  form  the 
shafts  ;  its  stays  are  iron- wrought,  with  arrows  shuttled.  Strike 
with  your  swords  this  web  of  victory.  .  .  . 

'Now  the  web  is  woven  and  the  field  reddened.  Bloody 
clouds  are  gathering  over  the  sky.  The  air  shall  be  dyed  with 
the  blood  of  men.  Let  us  ride  away  fast  on  our  bare-backed 
steeds,  with  our  drawn  swords  in  our  hands,  far  away.'1 

Then  when  the  battle  is  joined.  '  We  hewed  with  swords. 
We  reddened  our  swords  far  and  wide.  The  moonlike  shield 
was  crimsoned  [as  the  moon  is  when  eclipsed],  and  shrilly 
screamed  the  swords.  It  was  not  like  love-play  when  we  were 
splitting  of  helms.  Mighty  was  the  onset.  High  rose  the 
noise  of  the  spears.  .  .  .  They  rowed  amain.  They  bent 
their  backs  to  the  oars.  .  .  .  The  oar  thongs  split,  the 
hawsers  brake.  .  .  .  They  hewed  with  their  axes.  .  .  .  They 
put  their  fingers  to  the  bowstrings  and  shot  deftly.  They 
covered  themselves  with  their  shields.  So  long  as  they  re- 
mained alive  they  ceased  not  to  hew  with  their  swords,  riving 
mail-coats  and  cleaving  helmets.  Through  the  morning  they 
fought,  through  the  first  watches  and  till  afternoon.  The  field 
was  aswim  with  blood.' 

Here  is  another  passage  in  which,  we  may  note,  are  mentioned 
nearly  all  the  weapons  in  habitual  use  among  the  Northmen 
in  the  succeeding  century,  and  probably  also  in  use  in  this  first 
Viking  Age.  'The  flying  javelin  bit;  peace  was  belied  there; 
the  wolf  was  glad,  and  the  bow  was  drawn ;  the  bolts  clattered; 
the  spear-points  bit ;  the  flaxen  bowstring  bore  the  arrows  out 
of  the  bow.  He  brandished  the  buckler  on  his  arm,  the 
rouser  of  the  play  of  blades.  .  •  .  The  prince  drew  the  yew, 
the  wound- bees  flew.' 

■  Corpus  Poeticum  Boreale,  i  282. 


170  CHARACTER  OF  THE  VIKINGS. 

The  last  is  a  curious  arid  expressive  synonym  for  the  buzzing 
arrows.1 

Their  shields  hung  round  the  bulwarks  of  the  ship  as  it 
cleft  the  water — bright  round  shields,  painted,  say  red  or 
white,2  mainly  of  wood,  with  metal  bosses,  or  covered  with 
a  plate  of  metal.  In  every  way  the  Vikings  were  better 
armed  than  most  of  those  against  whom  they  fought ;  better 
armed  for  defence  in  their  ring-sarks  or  byrnies3;  better  for 
attack  with  their  swords  and  axes ;  better  armed  than  the 
peasant  who  took  his  place  in  the  Saxon  fyrd ;  far  better  than 
the  members  of  the  Irish  hosting. 

But  in  reading  the  accounts  of  battles  in  the  Edda  or  Saga 
lays,  we  must  remember  that  there  was  this  difference  between 
the  later  battles  and  those  with  which  we  are  now  concerned. 
It  was  during  the  second  part  of  the  Viking  Age  that  naval 
battles  became  common.  When  they  began  they  took  place 
between  rival  members  of  the  Scandinavian  race,  like  a  certain 
naval  battle  in  Ireland  which  we  shall  describe  hereafter.     At 


1  The  weapons  mentioned  in  the  Thulor  in  C.  P.  B.,  are  Sword,  Axe, 
Spear,  Arrows,  Bow,  Shield,  Helmet  and  Byrnie.  The  synonyms  for 
Sword,  and  the  parts  of  the  Sword,  are  as  many  as  for  the  other  weapons 
put  together  ;  Shield  comes  next,  then  Arrows,  then  Axe  and  Helmet  (tie). 

2  .  .  .  diiipom  rseoV  hann  kjolum, 
roSnom  rondom,  rau'Som  skjoldom, 
tjorgom  orom,  tjoldom  drifnom. 

Corpus  Poet.  B.  i.  256,  1.  18-20. 

Knerrir  komo  vestan  kapps  um  lystir, 

meS  ginandom  hofdom,  ok  grofnom  tinglom  $ 

hlaonir  voro  J?eir  holda  ok  hvitra  skjalda. 

Ibid.  I.64-66. 

3  The  mention  of  byrnies  is  very  frequent  in  the  Edda  poetry,  cf. 
Grinmism&l  9  (Bugge),  and  the  beautiful  passage  in  Helgakvi&a  Hundings- 
bana  15.  The  byrnie  is  called  a  war-net  (vig-nest)  in  Helgakv.  Hjor- 
vardss.  v.  8  (Bugge)  ['  Helgi  and  Svava,'  Corp.  P.  B.  i.  145,  1.  -$f\.  The 
word  is,  however,  probably  derived  from  the  Franks.  See  Ducange  s.  v, 
brunia. 


NAVAL   WARFARE.  171 

the  present  time,  and  against  the  Christians,  the  Northmen 
could  not  fight  such  battles,  simply  because  the  Christians  had 
no  navies  to  oppose  to  them. 

The  ships  as  yet  were  vessels  of  transport,  not  of  war. 
The  men  came  out  to  fight  on  land.  By  the  necessities  of 
the  case  they  were  foot  soldiers.  This  was  no  disadvantage  to 
the  Viking  in  England  or  in  Ireland,  where  the  opposing 
armies  were  likewise  made  up  almost  exclusively  of  foot  soldiers. 
But  on  the  Continent  this  arm  of  the  service  was  all  through 
the  ninth  century  rapidly  giving  place  to  the  horseman,  who 
was  the  forerunner  of  the  mediaeval  knight.  This  change 
might  and  ought  to  have  put  the  Northmen  at  a  serious  dis- 
advantage, had  the  armies  of  the  Lothairs  and  of  Charles  the 
Bald  been  more  united  or  better  handled.  But  the  Vikings 
learnt  from  their  enemies  ;  and  we  read  of  them  anon  as  so 
far  taking  a  lesson  from  the  Frank  military  system,  that  they 
began,  when  they  landed,  to  seize  horses  from  the  peasantry 
in  the  neighbourhood  and  to  ride  over  the  country  on  them — 
a  sort  of  mounted  marines,  as  it  were.  When,  in  the  latter 
half  of  our  Viking  Age,  they  had  established  regular  colonies 
in  France,  they  no  doubt  soon  acquired  all  the  military  arts 
known  to  the  Franks. 

They  had,  we  see,  bows,  spears,  swords,  and  axes.  Bows 
and  arrows  are  very  frequently  mentioned  in  the  Eddie  songs, 
and  we  have  many  accounts  of  persons  of  note  slain  by  the 
Viking  arrows  in  the  battles  of  this  century.  Swords  and 
spears  have  furnished  the  most  frequent  remains  in  this  kind, 
and  are  the  most  commonly  mentioned  in  literature.  The 
sword  especially,  though  not  originally  characteristic  of  the 
Teutons,  we  may  believe  to  have  been  among  the  Northmen 
a  universal  weapon.1     An  armoury  full  of  swords  was  the  best 

1  See  a'love,  p.  170,  note1. 


172  CHARACTER  OF  THE  VIKINGS. 

kind  of  '  capital ' ;  and  sometimes  one  particular  sword  would 
be  a  disputed  heirloom  for  generations.1  But  perhaps  the 
most  distinctive  and  characteristic  among  Viking  weapons 
(though  this  applies  more  especially  to  the  Danes)  was  the 
axe.  The  Danes  were  as  much  celebrated  for  their  axes  as 
the  Franks  had  been  at  an  earlier  date  for  theirs.  But  while 
the  francisca,  the  axe  of  the  Franks,  had  been  a  light  weapon 
— of  the  tomahawk  order  almost,  for  it  could  be  thrown  as 
well  as  used  for  striking — the  axes  of  the  Danes  were  two- 
handed  weapons  of  great  weight  and  power,  terrible  in  the 
hands  of  a  compacted,  well-disciplined  host. 

III. 

Albeit  the  earliest  Vikings  came  as  plunderers  only,  there  is 
no  evidence  that  they  came  forth  merely  through  a  love  of 
adventure  or  the  hope  of  gain.  Tradition  always  spoke  of  their 
exile  as  not  being  voluntary  but  enforced.2  Dudo's  account 
concerning  the  ancestors  of  the  Normans,  for  example,  is 
that  they  were  driven  forth  through  the  poverty  of  their  country. 

The  younger  men  of  the  Scandinavian  nationalities,  he  tells 
us,  after  they  were  grown  up,  often  conspired  against  their  fathers 
and  grandfathers  for  the  possession  of  their  property,  for  the 
population  was  excessive,  and  the  land  not  large  enough  for 
their  habitation.  By  an  old  custom,  therefore,  a  multitude  of 
the  young  men  were  collected  by  lot  and  thrust  out  of  the 
kingdom,  that  they  might  gain  by  force  a  kingd  )m  for  them- 
selves, and  the  others  live  in  peace.  Thus  it  was  that  the 
Getae,    also    called    Goths,    depopulated  nearly  the   whole   of 

1  As  the  sword  Tirfing  mentioned  in  the  Agantyr  lay,  Sigurd's  sword 
Gram,  &c 

2  The  Scandinavian  countries  at  all  times  of  the  world's  history  have 
had  to  send  out  exiles.  '1  hat  any  special  overcrowding  due  to  the  practice 
of  polygamy  was  the  cause  of  the  Viking  emigrations,  as  Steenstrup  thinks, 
I  do  not  myself  believe-     (See  K.  Maurer  in  fancier  Lit.  Zeit.  1877.) 


EXILES.  173 

Europe.  When  they  were  thus  exiled  they  made  a  sacrifice  to 
Thor,  one  of  their  gods.  They  raised  the  standard  of  war  upon 
their  ships.  They  were  sent  out  poor  that  they  might  gain 
riches  elsewhere.  They  were  deprived  of  their  own  possessions 
that  they  might  win  kingdoms  in  foreign  lands.  The  Daci 
(Danes)  driven  out  in  this  fashion  came  to  France.1 

Traditions  tell  us  of  the  young  leader  throwing  into  the  air 
a  lance  or  a  feather,  and  letting  its  fall  or  flight  determine 
which  way  he  and  his  band  should  turn.  It  is  a  fine  picture. 
All  the  world  being  alike  unknown,  it  mattered  little  which 
way  they  went — wherever  it  was  it  led  into  a  gloomy,  giant- 
guarded  region,  where  only  the  boldest  of  men  and  gods  ever 
penetrated.  We  must  bear  in  mind  that,  through  all  the  years 
during  which  the  Vikings  properly  so  called  were  winning 
their  way  in  Western  Europe,  other  bands  of  adventurers, 
whose  deeds  are  wholly  lost  in  oblivion,  were  winning  their 
way  not  less  successfully  in  the  East  :  they  were  founding 
that  Scandinavian  kingdom  which  was  called  at  first  Gardariki, 
or  Greater  Suithiod,  a  territory  extending  from  Ladoga  to 
Kiev,  commanding  the  early  trade  route  by  the  Dnieper  and 
the  Duna,  the  original  Empire  of  Russia,  the  germ  out  of 
which  has  sprung  the  Empire  of  All  the  Russias  of  to-day.2 

In   1862   was    celebrated    the   millenary  of   the 
foundation  of  this  kingdom  at  Novgorod  by  Rorik      '   ' 
the  Varangian. 3    We  must  not  forget  this  other  field  of  northern 

1  Dudo,  De  mor.  et  act.  due.  Norm.  i.  I  have  no  space  here  to  discuss 
the  question  of  Dudo's  value  as  a  reporter  of  northern  tradition.  He  has 
(to  speak  only  of  recent  publications)  been  attacked  by  Mr.  Howorth  in  the 
Arclueologia  for  1880,  and  defended  by  M.  Lair  in  the  preface  to  his  edition 
of  Dudo,  and  by  Prof.  Steenstrup,  Jndledning,  &c. 

a  Cf.  Spruner,  Handatlas,  No.  67. 

3  Or  the  Russ ;  for  the  very  name  Russ  is  probably  of  Scandinavian  (or 
Finno-Scandinavian)  origin.  It  is  believed  to  be  a  corruption  of  Rothmen 
('  Sea-farers  '),  and  is  therefore  almost  exactly  the  equivalent  of  the  name  of 
the  western  adventurers,  Vikings. 


174  CHARACTER  OF  THE  VIKINGS. 

adventure,  in  which  the  achievements  of  the  Scandinavians  were 
almost  more  important  than  those  in  the  west,  when  we  picture 
the  young  bands  of  emigrants  trusting  themselves  to  the  hands 
of  chance  as  they  set  forth  to  conquer  new  possessions.  But 
these  deeds  of  the  Northmen  in  the  east  .were  more  utterly 
without  their  sacred  bard  than  the  Viking  expeditions  properly 
so-called,  which  were  made  westward.  Even  if  it  were  not  so 
they  could  find  no  place  in  our  present  study. 

The  leader  chosen  for  such  an  expedition  would  not  be  the 
eldest  son  of  the  royal  house,  but  some  cadet,  very  often  some 
member  in  the  position  of  Hamlet,  one  who  stood  too  near 
the  throne;  for,  as  every  one  knows,  the  succession  in  Teutonic 
royal  families  was  not  that  of  strict  heredity,  but  more  like  the 
custom  which  the  Irish  called  tanistry,  whereby  the  eldest 
member  of  a  family  succeeded  to  the  kingship;  uncles  vreie 
often  preferred  to  nephews,  sometimes  the  sons  of  younger  sons 
were  preferred  to  those  of  the  eldest  son.  Any  inconvenient 
claimant  would,  no  doubt,  often  be  got  rid  of  by  placing  him 
at  the  head  of  a  Viking  expedition.  Such,  according  to  one 
tradition,  was  the  case  writh  the  greatest  legendary  Viking 
leader,  Ragnar  Lodbrog ;  such,  according  to  another  tradi- 
tion, was  the  case  with  the  most  famous  historical  Viking 
leader,  Rolf.  But,  as  Dudo  says,  they  went  out  poor  to  come 
home  rich  ;  they  lost  their  possessions  at  home  that  they 
might  win  kingdoms  abroad.  They  fulfilled  the  conditions 
which  Teutonic  romance  postulates  for  that  ideal  Teutonic 
hero,  the  despised  younger  son,  the  Boots  of  folk  tales. 

Even  before  Viking  days  the  legendary  hero  dear  to  the 
popular  mind  was  of  the  same  kind.  Beowulf  is  the  youngest 
brother  of  Hygelac,  his  man,  one,  only  the  first,  among  Hygelac's 
house-thanes.  There  was  some  tradition,  too,  that  Beowulf,  like 
the  typical  hero  of  the  popular  romance,  had  had  his  years  of 
idleness  and  contempt  at  the  hands  of  his  brethren.     After 


THE  HERO.  175 

the  death  of  Hygeldc,  Hygelac's  son — contrary  almost  to 
received  Teutonic  tradition,  for  he  was  only  a  boy — was  raised 
to  the  throne,  and  Beowulf  became  his  guardian.  So,  too, 
Cassiodorus  relates  of  that  renowned  Gothic  warrior,  Gensomir, 
that,  though  the  greatest  man-at-arms  of  his  nation,  he  refused 
the  crown,  and  contented  himself  with  the  post  of  guardian  to 
the  young  king,  his  nephew. 

In  all  this  there  is  something  of  a  proud  Entsagung,  which 
has  had,  no  doubt,  its  fascination  for  all  people  of  all  times — 
as  it  appears,  for  example,  in  the  state  and  character  of 
Achilles — but  more  especially  so  for  the  Teutonic  character ; 
and  which  is,  I  take  it,  the  secret  of  much  of  the  success  of 
the  Teutons  in  the  art  of  government.  They  have  thereby 
been  able  to  grasp  the  substance  and  dispense  with  the  show  of 
power,  as,  among  the  Merovingians,  the  Mayors  of  the  Palace 
long  did ;  as  the  Norman  dukes  or  the  dukes  of  Apulia  did 
when  they  accepted  the  lower  title ;  as  did  the  stadholders  in 
Holland  ;  as  Napoleon  might  wisely  have  done;  but  this  virtue, 
though  it  was  essentially  a  Roman  one,  has  rarely  been  dis- 
played among  a  modern  Latin  race. 

In  the  case  of  many  of  the  legendary  heroes  of  the  Teutons, 
there  was  not  even  a  blood  relationship  to  the  king  to  induce 
them  to  preserve  their  lower  rank ;  not  being  by  birth  inferior, 
and  in  prowess  far  above,  the  monarch,  they  yet  consent  to 
remain  his  man,  as  Siegfred  [Sifrit]  does  to  Gunther  in  the 
Niebelungen  legend.  And  I  do  not  know  in  any  poem  a 
passage  more  pathetic  than  that  scene  where,  after  his  last 
day's  hunting,  Siegfred  runs  down  to  the  stream  to  quench  his 
thirst,  and  when  arrived  there  gives  place  to  his  lord,  and  will 
not  drink  before  Gunther  ,  while  all  the  time  Gunther  and 
Hagen  are  only  waiting  till  he  stoops  over  the  water  to  transfix 
him  with  their  spears. 

Whatever  the  Vikings  and  their  leaders  may  have  lost  in 


176  CHARACTER  OF  THE  VIKINGS. 

rank  and  possessions  they  gained  in  glory.  It  was  to  them, 
and  not  to  those  at  home,  that  the  thoughts  of  their  country- 
men turned,  in  their  honour  that  the  new  crop  of  lays  and 
sagas  sprang  up.  We  have  seen  two  kings  of  the  Danes  in 
Denmark,  Siegfred  and  Godfred,  in  the  days  of  Charlemagne — 
the  latter  a  conspicuous  figure.  Some  three  or  four  names  of 
their  successors  appear  in  the  Chronicles,  one  of  them  an 
important  personage.  Then  the  list  ceases,  and  for  a  period 
we  do  not  hear  so  much  as  a  single  authentic  name  of  a  ruler 
in  Scandinavian  countries.  Meanwhile  the  Viking  leaders 
begin  to  appear,  and  at  the  very  time  that  the  chroniclers 
become  silent  about  the  kings  in  Denmark  and  Sweden,  of 
Jutland  and  Leire,  of  Suithiod  and  Gauthiod,  their  pages  are 
filled  with  the  names  of  the  sea-captains  from  the  north. 

IV. 

Jutland  and  the  isles  were  Danish.  Danish,  too,  was 
the  extreme  southern  bulge  of  the  Scandinavian  peninsula, 
the  provinces  to-day  called  Halland,  Skane,  Bleking,  and 
Smaland.  Next  to  these  came  Gauthiod,  West  Gothland  and 
East  Gothland,  and  north  of  Gauthiod,  Suithiod,  in  which 
stood  Sigtuna  and  its  sacred  groves.  But  the  Scandinavians 
on  this  side  of  the  Scandinavian  peninsula  did  not  probably 
extend  further  north  than  the  Dal  river,  a  little  to  the  north 
of  Upsala ;  all  the  rest  was  Lapp  or  Finnish  territory.  The 
Norsemen  stretched  as  far  as  Hordaland — that  is  to  say,  the 
Hardanga  Fjord  and  Sogne  Fjord ;  probably  farther  north 
to  the  Trondhjem  Fjord;  but  these  districts  were  only  thinly 
inhabited.  The  bulk  of  the  population  lay  on  the  northern 
coast  of  the  Scager  Rack  and  Cattegat,  that  narrow  inlet  to  the 
Baltic  which  in  Viking  days  bore  the  name  of  Viken — the  Vik 
(Bay)  par  excellence.1 

1  The  northern  coast  was  also  called  Viken  or  Westfold.    There  was  once 


HOME  OF  THE  VIKINGS.  177 

But  in  all  these  lands  only  the  outer  fringes  of  the  country 
were  inhabited ;  the  centre  was  still  possessed  by  vast  virgin 
forests.1 

Writers  upon  the  Viking  Age  love  to  dwell  upon  the  picture 
of  the  hardy  mountaineers  of  Norway,  the  fishermen  in  the 
rocky  fjords,  gaining  from  their  bitter  struggles  with  nature  the 
training  for  their  Viking  life.  But  the  picture  needs  some 
correction.  Though  nature  is  no  doubt  hard  and  sterile 
enough  over  all  the  Scandinavian  lands,  yet  it  remains  true 
that  the  great  body  of  the  Scandinavian  people  must  have 
been  to  be  found,  not  in  mountainous  regions  or  on  storm- 
vexed  coasts,  such  as  those  of  the  Hardanger  or  the  Sogne, 
but  in  the  low-lying  lands  near  the  Baltic.  Just  so  it  is  with 
Scotland.  To  Frenchmen  and  most  Continental  writers  the 
Scotchmen  are  always  montagnards.  Yet  it  remains  true  that 
the  history  of  Scotland  is  the  history  of  the  Lowlands  and  not 
of  the  Highlands.  Of  Norway  even  the  later  history  of  the 
tenth  and  eleventh  centuries,  the  days  of  Olaf  Tryggvesson 
or  Olaf  the  Saint,  is  connected  far  less  with  the  Hardanger 
and  Sogne  regions  than  in  the  first  place  with  Viken  and  the 
Christiania  Fjord,  and,  in  the  second  place,  with  the  scarcely 
less  fertile  Trondhjem  Fjord,  half-way  to  the  North  Cape.2 

Yet  there  is  one  feature  of  this  early  Scandinavian  life  which 
we  can  better  realize  to-day  in  the  wilder  fjord  districts  than 
elsewhere.  If  you  have  stayed  for  a  while  at,  say,  Gudvangen 
on  the  Sogne,  at  the  end  of  that  awful  valley  of  the  Naerodal, 
on  which  during  many  months  the  sun  never  shines,  at 
Aardal  (Black  Dale)  right  at  the  extremity  of  the  same  fjord, 

a  larger  district  called  the  Vik  (Viken)  stretching  along  the  whole  of  the 
north  coast  of  the  Skager  Rack  and  Cattegat.  Later  the  name  was  limited 
to  the  coast  between  the  Christiania  Fjord  and  the  Gotha  Elf.  This  last 
river  was  the  boundary  of  Norway  in  those  days. 

1  See  Chapter  II. 

8  See  for  a  good  example  of  this  The  Saga  of  Hakon  the  Good. 

13 


178  CHARACTER  OF  THE  VIKINGS. 

or  at  any  place  such  as  these  two,  where  the  walls  of  rock  rise 
precipitously  on  every  side  and  exit  seems  impossible,  then 
you  will  learn  to  realize  how  completely  the  water  may  be  the 
one  path  to  an  extent  which  in  these  days  of  roads  and  rail- 
ways is  not  possible  elsewhere.  On  Sundays  or  the  days  of 
any  festival — best  of  all  if  it  be  Midsummer  Eve,  the  day 
of  the  sun's  festival,  a  survival  from  heathen  times — when 
some  gathering  of  neighbours  is  expected,  as  you  stand  looking 
over  the  blank  water  you  will  see  how,  as  if  starting  out  of  the 
rocks  themselves,  a  multitude  of  little  craft  have  suddenly 
emerged  to  view,  till  the  face  of  the  fjord,  so  empty  a  moment 
before,  becomes  covered  with  these  boats,  some  far  off  and 
some  near,  but  each  making  for  the  same  trysting-place.  On 
the  still  evening  the  beat  of  the  oars,  the  singing  voices  of  the 
young  men  and  girls  sound  far  over  the  water.  They  are 
gathering  to  pay  their  half-heathen  rites  to  the  sun  on  his 
midsummer  day,  by  lighting  up  the  Bale-Fire  (Raider's  Bale) 
and  by  dancing  through  all  the  undarkened  night. 

Very  easily  at  such  a  time  our  fancy  takes  us  back  to  days 
when  it  needed  not  precipitous  rocks,  only  a  rough  and  woody 
interior  and  the  safe,  inviting  water  of  the  Baltic,  to  turn  the 
sea — the  '  swan-road '  of  our  early  poetry — into  a  road,  and 
not  a  barrier,  between  one  place  and  another.  We  under- 
stand how  these  lands  came  to  be  set  apart  for  the  cultivation 
of  the  art  of  boat-building  and  their  children  a  destined  race 
of  explorers ;  and  we  are  led  to  ask  ourselves  how  much  we 
may  owe  to  the  Scandinavian  blood  which  runs  in  our  veins. 

V. 

The  weak  point  in  the  armour  of  the  Viking  adventurer  was 
that  he  went  forth  unaccompanied  by  the  Divine  powers. 
There  was,  we  have  said,  a  quasi-religious  sanction  given  to 
his  treasure-seeking :    he  retained,  and  even  enlarged    upon, 


FATE.  179 

one  supernatural  element  in  his  creed — that  special  belief  in 
the  wise  shield-maidens  of  Odin.  But  on  the  whole  he  carried 
but  little  of  his  ancient  creed  with  him.  We  must  not  think  of 
these  adventurers  (as  some  writers  have  represented  the  Vikings) 
as  a  sort  of  Moslems  of  the  north,  with  a  northern  paradise 
(Valhdll,  Walhalla)  waiting  for  all  who  died  slain  by  the  sword. 
The  existence  of  Valholl  was  probably  not  much  more  than 
a  pious  opinion  among  the  Northmen  in  the  Viking  Age; 
and  the  place  was  never  represented,  like  the  Moslem's  Para- 
dise, as  the  reward  of  those  who  died  fighting  for  their  creed. 

These  Vikings  had  thus  no  spiritual  power  to  oppose  to 
Christianity,  and  when  they  came  in  contact  with  it,  it  was  not 
long  before  its  mystic  influence  began  to  obtain  dominion  over 
their  own  minds,  as  it  had  done  over  the  minds  of  the  earlier 
Teutonic  wanderers.  But  of  this  when  it  began.  For  the 
majority  of  the  adventurers  at  the  beginning  of  the  Viking  Age 
it  were  perhaps  best  to  say  that  they  bade  adieu  to  their  own 
supernal  powers  when  they  left  their  native  country,  but  gained 
no  new  ones.  As  they  say  in  America  that  there  is  no  god 
west  of  the  Mississippi,  so  we  may  say  that  for  them  there  was 
no  god  beyond  the  Eyder  or  the  Vik. 

The  one  strong  belief  which  remained  to  them  was  the  belief 
in  Fate,  which,  in  its  own  form,  shines  in  their  northern 
romances  with  as  deep  and  pathetic  a  glow  as  in  the  Greek 
tragedy.  The  life  of  the  hero  of  these  sagas  ends  almost 
always  in  the  same  way.  He  is  sacrificed  on  the  altar  of  Fate, 
and  of — what  shall  we  say  ? — of  the  theory  of  conduct  which 
the  belief  in  Fate  engendered.  The  hero  knows  how  and 
where  danger  lies  in  wait  for  him.  It  is  treachery  for  the  most 
part,  the  treachery  of  some  near  friend  or  kinsman.  But  his 
code  of  honour  prevents  him  from  turning  aside  to  avoid  it. 
It  would  not,  as  we  should  say,  be  gentlemanly  to  show  sus- 
picion of  a  host  or  comrade,  and  so  he  falls  with  his  eyes  open 


i8o  CHARACTER  OF  THE  VIKINGS. 

into  the  snare.  As  a  man  may  not  avoid  his  fate,  he  can 
at  least  step  down  with  dignity  into  the  dark  pit,  wrapping, 
as  it  were,  his  mantle  about  him  as  he  passes. 

Sigurd  from  the  prophecy  of  Gripir  and  from  the  talking 
eagles,  Siegfred  from  his  spae-wife  Kriemhild,  had  foreknow- 
ledge of  their  end.1  They  might  have  turned  back,  but  they 
went  on  all  the  same.  And  one  after  another  we  see  the  saga 
heroes  throwing  their  lives  away,  as  it  seems,  voluntarily  and 
aimlessly. 

There  is,  no  doubt,  in  these  pictures  a  touch  of  the  whimsi- 
cality of  a  savage's  adherence  to  a  traditional  code  of  conduct, 
though  he  himself  knows  not  the  reason  of  it.  But  there  is 
likewise  in  all  the  germ  of  a  rude  chivalry,  which  in  other  days, 
among  the  Northmen  when  they  had  become  Normans,  took 
nobler  forms. 

Close  beside  this  belief  in  Fate  stood  another  very  curious 
and  beautiful  notion — that  of  the  man  who  went  about  death- 
doomed.  As  before  a  man  was  death-doomed  he  might  come 
unexpectedly  out  of  deadly  danger,  for 

Wyrd  oft  saves  an  undoomed  man, 

so  the  doomed  one  in  moments  of  seeming  security,  in  casual 
or  domestic  intercourse,  would  suddenly  betray  himself  as 
feigr — as  the  Scotch  still  say,  'fey.'2     Sometimes  it  was  by 

*  Skiljomk  heilir  !     Munat  skopom  vinna 
Nu  hefir  ]>u,  Gripir,  vel  gort  sem  ek  beiddak. 
Fliott  mindir  Jm  friftri  segja 
Mina  aevi,  ef  jm  mattir  J>at. 

Let  us  part  in  peace.     None  can  fate  withstand. 
Now  hast  thou,  Gripir,  what  I  bade  thee  done. 
You  would,  I  ween,  have  willingly  told 
My  life  better,  had  you  been  able. 

•  Allt  es  feigs  foraft  (Fafnismal).     '  The  doomed  man's  death  is  every 
where. '     '  Every  place  is  an  abyss  for  the  doomed  man.' 

Or  again : — 


'FEY.'  181 

unusual  high  spirits  that  the  man  who  was  fey  drew  on  him 
the  notice  of  his  fellows,  and  that  form  of  the  superstition 
is  best  retained  in  the  Scottish  notion  of  being  '  fey '—  some- 
thing in  it  of  the  classic,  or  say  rather  universal,  idea  of 
Nemesis — that  the  gods,  envious  of  too  much  happiness,  and 
seeing  any  one  in  such  a  case,  at  once  resolve  upon  his  over- 
throw.1 When  King  Olaf  the  Saint  lay  with  his  army  upon 
one  side  of  the  fatal  valley  of  Stiklestad,  with  the  hostile  power 
of  the  bonders  defiling  towards  him  on  the  opposite  hill,  he 
laid  him  down  for  a  moment  to  rest  with  his  head  upon  the 
knee  of  his  trusted  warrior,  Finn  Arnesson.  Slumber  overtook 
him,  and  he  slept  a  little  while.  But  as  he  slept  the  bonders' 
army  was  seen  to  be  advancing  in  great  numbers  and  with 
banners  raised.  Therefore  Finn  awakened  the  king.  .  .  . 
The  king  said,  '  Why  did  you  awake  me,  Finn,  and  not  allow 
me  to  finish  my  dream  ?  .  .  .  They  are  not  yet  so  near : 
would  you  had  let  me  sleep.' 

'What  was  the  dream,  sire?'  Finn  said,  'whose  loss  appears 
to  you  so  great  ? ' 

And  the  king  told  his  dream — that  he  seemed  to  see  a  high 
ladder,  and  on  this  he  ascended  so  high  up  in  the  air  that 
heaven  was  open ;  for  the  ladder  reached  to  it.  '  And  when 
thou  awokest  me  I  was  come  to  the  topmost  step.' 

Kveld  lifir  maS  ekki,  eptir  kvift  Noma  (HamSismal). 

No  man  can  live  past  the  eve  after  the  Fates  have  spoken. 

Every  one  will  remember  the  powerful  scene  in  Guy  Mannering,  *  The 
gauger  is  fey.'  A  still  more  beautiful  and  pathetic  rendering  of  the  same 
idea  is  Shakespeare's  in  Romeo  and  Juliet : — 

My  bosom's  lord  sits  lightly  on  his  throne, 
And  all  day  long  an  unaccustomed  gladness  ' 
Lifts  me  above  the  ground  with  cheerful  thoughts. 

1  Herodotus'  story  of  Polycrates  is  of  course  a  typical  example  of  this 
belief. 


1 82  CHARACTER  OF  THE  VIKINGS. 

Then  Finn  replied,/  The  dream  seems  not  so  good  to  me 
as  it  does  to  thee.     I  think  thou  art  "  fey,"  king.' 

VI. 

Such,  then,  were  the  equipments,  material  and  moral,  of  the 
Baltic  peoples,  who  to  our  fancy  stand  at  this  moment  trimming 
the  wings  of  their  dragon  ships,  scarcely  yet  beyond  the  verge 
of  their  new  life.  The  one  thing  of  all  others  which  it  is 
hardest  for  us  to  realize  is,  that  the  life  was  so  new,  the  world 
so  unknown  to  the  greatest  number.  We,  in  our  mental  pic- 
tures of  the  Europe  of  those  days,  cannot  but  see  some  parts  of 
it  as  if  visibly  bathed  in  light ;  those  are  the  parts  in  which 
authentic  history  has  begun.  Other  parts,  of  which  we  have  no 
authentic  records,  are  as  visibly  cast  in  shadow.  But  from  the 
Northman's  point  of  view  we  must  reverse  the  picture.  He  had 
some  knowledge  (vague,  no  doubt)  of  the  Baltic  lands — first 
those  of  his  own  kinsfolk,  next  those  of  the  Slavonic  peoples, 
his  Vendland — his  Vanaland,  perhaps — of  Obotriti,  of  Wiltzi, 
who  are  no  more  than  names  to  us,  of  others  who  are  not  even 
named  in  authentic  history.  Something  of  these  and  of  their 
ways  he  knew ;  not  much,  but  more  than  we  shall  ever  know. 

Beyond  this  circle  all  was  strange  for  the  vast  majority  of 
the  Viking  wanderers,  not  less  strange  than  in  the  old  Northern 
mythology  was  all  the  land  beyond  the  Midgard  Sea.  Some 
one  or  two  wanderers  had  fared  south,  may  even  have 
abandoned  their  creed  and  become  Christians,  like  the  half- 
mythical  Holger  (Otkar1),  the  Dane  who,  about  a.d.  760,  came 
to  Francia  and  settled  there.  But  as  these  wanderers  would 
not  return,  the  stay-at-home  Northmen  were  none  the  wiser. 

We  have  a  remarkable  example  to  show  how  real  was  this 
feeling  of  strangeness  ;  how  real,  too,  that  giant  world  of  the 

1  In  Mon.  Sangall,  the  best  historical  authority  for  his  existence  ;  Oger 
in  the  Chansons  de  Geste. 


THE  UNKNOWN  WORLD.  183 

Teutonic  mythology  whereof  we  spoke  a  chapter  or  two  ago, 
difficult  though  it  is  for  us  to  realize  this.  One  name  for  that 
giant-world,  or  Jotunheim,  among  the  Northmen  was  Bjarma- 
land  (Biarmia),  a  name  which  was  no  doubt  appropriated  from 
Perm,  south  of  the  White  Sea,  as  mythical  places,  Olym puses, 
Tempes,  Nysian  Plains,  generally  do  get  identified  with  actual 
localities.  There  is,  however,  no  doubt  that  Biarmia  was,  in 
many  Northern  myths,  scarcely  distinguishable  from  Hel,  the 
home  of  the  dead.  It  was  like  Helheim,  both  under  the  world 
and  at  its  extreme  limit.  In  Saxo  Grammaticus'  story  of 
the  Voyage  of  King  Gorm  the  Old  and  his  comrade  Thorkill, 
we  come  to  this  Bjarmaland,  and  to  a  town  in  it  which,  says 
Saxo,  '  looked  like  a  vaporous  cloud.'  (This  is  the  Gram- 
marian's translation  of  Niflhel,  a  portion  of  Hel.)  Two  dogs 
exceeding  fierce  guarded  the  entrance  of  the  king's  palace. 
Within  the  gates  were  horrible  black  spectres  ;  and  the  travel- 
lers were  well-nigh  choked  by  the  putrid  stench  which  filled  the 
air.  Clearly  no  human  dwelling-place.  Thorkill  made  another 
journey  or  another  descent  to  this  out-world  region ;  and  on 
this  occasion  he  found  the  old  Giant  Loki,  whom  the  gods  had 
chained  till  Doomsday.  As  a  remembrance  of  his  journey 
Thorkill  plucked  three  hairs  of  the  giant's  beard,  and  brought 
them  back  to  the  upper  earth.  But  they  made  so  dreadful  a 
smell  that  it  caused  a  plague,  and  many  died  therefrom. 

Now  there  is  a  legend  of  Viking  days  with  almost  the  same 
'plot.*'  In  it  the  typical  Viking  hero,  Ragnar  Lodbrog,  goes 
upon  an  expedition.  He,  too,  assaults  a  strange  town  and 
carries  thence  a  prize.  But  after  the  assault  an  uncanny  mist 
surrounds  the  northern  troops  ;  they  are  so  enveloped  that 
they  can  scarcely  find  their  way  back  to  their  ships  ;  many  are 
killed  before  they  can  do  so.  Nor  does  the  vengeance  of  the 
infernal  powers  and  of  the  lord  of  this  vaporous  city  end  here. 
Ragnar  Lodbrog  carries  back  his  prize  with  him,  and  his  troops 


1 84  CHARACTER  OF  THE  VIKINGS. 

their  booty ;  but  they  carry  back  also  the  infection  of  a  plague, 
or  of  a  sort  of  dysentery  or  cholera  which  kills  many  of  them, 
which  spreads  among  the  Danes  after  they  have  returned  to 
their  native  Denmark.  What  is  this  city  which  in  Viking 
tradition  corresponds  to  Niflheim,  the  lower  world  ? 

By  chance  we  have  an  account  of  the  same  expedition 
preserved  by  Christian  chroniclers.  They,  too,  record  that  the 
leader  of  the  Vikings  was  called  Ragnar.  They,  too,  tell  us  of 
the  mist  which  enveloped  the  plunderers  (which  had,  no  doubt, 
nothing  of  the  supernatural  about  it),  and  of  the  sickness  which 
they  carried  home  with  them ;  this  sickness,  say  the  Christian 
writers,  was  only  stayed  after  the  release  of  all  the  Christian 
prisoners,  and  after  the  restoration  by  Ragnar  of  the  plunder 
which  he  had  taken  from  their  churches.  But  the  chroniclers 
add  to  all  this  the  name  of  the  spot  where  these  wonders  took 
place  ;  and  the  place  is — Paris,  no  other ;  Paris,  the  favourite 
city  of  Julian,  Paris,  where  Pippin  lay  buried,  which,  though 
not  precisely  a  royal  city,  was  from  its  position  even  then  one 
of  the  most  important  centres  of  trade  and  one  of  the  richest 
towns  in  France.1  A  volume  could  not  better  express  than 
this  one  fact  the  feelings  with  which  the  wanderers  set  forth  upon 
their  new  life.  Such  feelings  are  best  rendered  by  the  lines  of 
the  Eddaic  poem,  from  which  we  have  already  quoted,  describ- 
ing how  Skirnir,  the  messenger  of  Frey,  set  forth  on  a  journey 
into  Jotunheim.  Words  like  those  which  Skirnir  addressed  to 
his  horse,  the  Viking  leader  might  have  addressed  to  his  ship : — 

Dark  it  grows  without, 

Time  it  is  to  fare 

Over  the  misty  ways.3 

We  will  both  return 

Or  that  all-powerful  Jotun3 

Shall  seize  us  both.4 


1  See  Chapter  IX.  2  Orig.  « fells.f 

3  The  Jotun  in  this  case  is  really  Death.  4  Skirnisfor. 


CHAPTER  VI. 

THE    VIKINGS    IN    IRELAND. 

I. 

Nothing  of  the  character  of  those  new-comers,  as  we  have 
sketched  it  in  the  preceding  chapter,  nothing  of  their  history 
or  their  birthplace  was  known  to  the  Christian  chroniclers  of 
the  time.  How  could  it  be  ?  By  an  exception  which  is  extra- 
ordinary those  'first  three  Viking  ships'  which  came  to  the  shore 
of  England  are  in  our  Chronicle  reported  to  have  come  from 
Hserethaland.  But  where  that  Hserethaland  lay,  whether  it  was, 
as  has  generally  been  assumed,  Hordaland,  or  the  Hardanger 
region  of  Norway,  whether  finally  the  name  Haerethaland  may 
not  have  arisen  from  a  copyist's  mistake  are  matters  for 
question.1 

After  this  date  the  chroniclers  in  the  different  Christian 
countries  know  little  of  the  home  of  the  pirates.  The  Vikings 
are  to  them  heathens,  Gentiles,  foreigners  {Gaill,  Ir.),2  lake- 
men  (Lochlann — an  expression  only  used  in  Ireland),  Northmen 
(Nbrmanm]  a  word  which  we  must  translate  Scandinavians  not 
Norsemen  3)  and  Danes.    This  last  word  again,  in  the  mouth  of 

1  See  above,  p.  141  and  note  3. 

a  In  the  Four  Masters  the  Vikings  are  at  first  pirates  (sea-robbers),  after- 
Wards  heathen  (Gentiles),  or  foreigners  (Gaill). 
3  Not  necessarily  Norsemen,  I  mean. 


1 86  THE  VIKINGS  IN  IRELAND. 

a  Frisian  or  a  Saxon  chronicler,  might  very  well  be  a  general 
name  for  any  Scandinavians. 

From  this  necessary  ignorance  on  the  part  of  the  con- 
temporary chroniclers  of  ail  which  could  give  distinctness  and 
the  element  of  personality  to  the  history  of  the  early  raids, 
and  from  the  fact  that  through  all  this  period  the  native 
literature  of  Scandinavia  is  yet  unborn,  there  results  a  sad 
uniformity  and  dulness  in  the  earlier  pages  of  Viking  history. 
There  is  no  help  for  this.  We  must,  on  the  path  of  history  as 
on  all  other  paths,  make  up  our  minds  to  much  monotonous 
travelling.  We  cannot  be  concerned  with  ideas  and  pictures 
only ;  we  must  follow  the  course  of  events  even  when  those 
events  are  recorded  only  in  the  driest  outline.  It  is  in  view  of 
much  that  must,  I  know,  prove  stony  and  dull  in  this  history 
(the  present  chapter  perhaps  the  stoniest  and  most  dull  of 
all),  that  I  have  placed  after  the  title-page  those  lines  of 
Michael  Angelo,  which  I  have  myself  often  found  a  sort  of 
talisman  upon  the  drier  roads  of  history  and  of  life  : — 

The  best  of  artists  hath  no  thought  to  show 
Which  the  rough  stone  in  its  superfluous  shell 
Doth  not  include  :  to  break  the  marble  spell 

Is  all  the  hand  which  serves  the  brain  can  do.1 

Its  application  to  the  present  case  is  that  even  the  dreariest 
chronicles  contain  within  them — they  cover  up  and  conceal, 
but  still  hold — the  records  of  a  mighty  activity,  a  quenchless 
life,  which  the  highest  art  of  the  historian  could  never  revivify 
in  half  its  natural  fire  and  beauty.  That  incomparable  power — 
whether  you  call  it  human  or  Divine — which  moulds  human 
history  into  shape,  greater  than  any  power  of  any  artist,  is  not 
only  always  at  work,  but  can  be  always  seen  at  work,  though 
dimly  seen  sometimes  through  the  meagreness  of  our  records. 

1  Mr.  Symond's  translation. 


FORECAST  OF  SUBSEQUENT  HISTORY.  187 

It  would  be  an  impertinence  to  spend  words  in  painting  the 
immensity  of  the  creation  which  is  hidden  behind  the  super- 
fluous shell  of  our  present  history.  For  that  is  nothing  less 
than  the  Europe  of  the  Middle  Ages ;  the  Europe  which 
brought  to  birth  the  mediaeval  cathedral,  and  all  that  that 
implies  ;  that  created  the  Latin  hymn,  the  vast  and  tenebrous 
mythology  and  belief  attaching  to  the  future  state,  the  Vision 
of  Dante  ;  who  can  record  how  much  else  of  good  and  of  evil 
it  has  created?  These  are  some  of  the  things  which  lie 
beyond  the  end  of  our  journey,  and  which  though  we  shall 
never  reach  (in  this  present  history),  we  can  see  them  always 
before  us  and  recognize  the  signs  of  our  approach. 

Another  birth  of  Time  lying  in  the  same  way  beyond  the 
compass  of  the  present  volume,  but  only  just  beyond  it,  is  the 
Old  Norse  literature;  a  creation  far  smaller,  doubtless,  than 
that  of  mediaeval  Europe  or  the  Gothic  Cathedral,  but  far 
greater  than  most  readers  are  inclined  to  suppose.  A  thing 
unique,  too,  belonging  to  its  own  age,  and  to  none  other  in  the 
history  of  the  world,  which  has  had  its  birth  and  growth  and 
decline,  and  has  then  died  away,  leaving,  we  might  fairly  say, 
no  successor.  This  is  an  outcome  of  the  contact  between 
Christendom  and  the  Vikings.  We  cannot,  I  think,  refuse  to 
accept  the  theory  which  assigns  the  birthplace  of  the  Northern 
literature  to  some  part  of  the  extreme  west  of  Europe,  to  one 
or  other  of  the  kingdoms  which  the  Vikings  conquered  from 
the  Celts  in  Scotland  and  Ireland — in  the  Orkneys  or  the 
Shetlands,  in  Caithness,  in  the  Hebrides,  in  Man,  or  round  the 
Irish  coast.1  These  different  kingdoms  came  in  the  course  of 
time  to  be  so  closely  allied,  that  it  makes  little  difference 
which  of  them  we  choose  for  the  cradle  of  the  Edda  and  Saga 
literature.     In  these  regions  the  contact  between  the  Vikings 

1  Cf.  Vigfusson  in  Sturlunga  Saga,  Preface,  and  Corp.  P.  B.  Introd.  Cf. 
also  Todd,  War,  &c,  p.  xxviii. 


1 88  THE  VIKINGS  IN  IRELAND. 

and  the  Christians  was  wholly  different  from  what  it  was  in 
Central  Europe ;  the  Christianity  itself  of  these  countries  was 
of  a  peculiar  character.  But  such  as  they  were  the  effects 
of  that  contact  were  very  marked.  Should  our  inquiries  ever 
advance  into  the  ensuing  century  we  should  obtain  a  clearer 
idea  of  what  were  these  effects.  At  present  this,  too,  stands 
hidden  in  the  future,  as  the  image  within  the  stone. 

II. 

Something  has  been  said,  and  more  might  easily  have  been 
said,  of  the  learned  and  spiritual  life  of  Ireland  in  these  and 
earlier  days.  But  let  not  the  reader  inquire  after  the  contem- 
porary political  life.  Scarcely  anything  can  be  told  of  it  except 
empty  dynastic  lists,  or  bald  records  of  continual  civil  wars. 
Irish  historians  contend  (some  of  them  do  at  least)  that  about 
the  time  of  St.  Columba  the  country  really  was  showing  signs 
of  coalescing  into  one  kingdom,  and  of  making  a  new  begin- 
ning in  policy.  It  is  a  pious  opinion  which  one  would  not 
wish  to  disturb.  All  acknowledge  that  between  that  day  and 
the  days  to  which  we  have  now  come,  when  the  invasions  of 
the  Northmen  brought  '  unnumbered  woes  '  upon  the  people 
of  Erin,  that  progress  had  not  been  continuous.  And  now  the 
power  of  the  Ard-Ri,  the  so-called  Over-King  of  Ireland,  was 
little  more  than  nominal  over  his  brother  kings  of  the  larger 
districts.  The  number  of  persons  who  bore  the  name  of  king 
was  almost  uncountable.  *  No  dun  (fort)  without  its  king.'  It 
is  a  maxim  of  Irish  law.  Each  of  these  kinglets,  again,  was  no 
doubt  bound,  though  by  a  loose  tie  of  service,  to  some  one  or 
other  of  the  kings  of  the  greater  divisions.  Only  one  principle, 
the  family  or  clan  feeling,  was  kept  alive  in  this  embryo  nation- 
ality. And  where  all  else  seems  to  fluctuate,  we  have  the  extra- 
ordinary phenomenon  of  one  great  clan,  the  Hy-Njall  (O'Neil), 
having  already  remained  the  dominant  race  in  Ireland  for  four 


CONDITION  OF  IRELAND.  189 

hundred  years,  and  furnishing  from  among  the  heads  of  one 
or  another  division  of  the  clan  all  the  chief  kings  of  Ireland 
during  this  period.  These  O'Neils  all  claimed  descent  from  a 
certain  Njall  of  the  nine  hostages,  whose  date  is  given  a.d. 
396-406. 

We  may  look  upon  Ireland  as  divided  first  of  all  into  two 
great  sections,  a  northern  and  a  southern ;  the  dividing  line 
running  somewhere  about  the  latitude  of  the  Slieve-Bloom 
mountains.  In  the  Northern  half  reigned  the  different  kings 
of  the  O'Neil  family.  And  their  chief  rivals  at  this  period  were 
the  king  or  kings  of  Munster,  the  southern  half  of  Ireland, 
which  formed  sometimes  a  single  kingdom,  sometimes  was 
divided  into  two.  The  most  southern  of  the  two  branches  of  the 
O'Neils  reigned  in  Meath,  a  kingdom  which  in  those  days  in- 
cluded a  great  part  of  Leinster.  In  Ulster,  amid  the  oak  forests 
of  Derry,  reigned  the  great  family  of  the  northern  O'Neils,  whose 
king,  Njall-Caille,  beside  the  kingdom  of  Ulster,  enjoyed  from 
a.d.  833-845  in  addition  the  title  of  Over-King  of  Erin.  Out 
of  Ulster  was  cut  the  kingdom  of  Irish  Dalriada ;  and  out  of 
Meath  was  taken  the  small  kingdom  of  Bregia  (Bray).  Bregia, 
situated  as  it  was  on  the  east  coast,  was  an  important  district  in 
the  history  of  the  Vikings  in  Ireland,  a  likely  object  for  their 
attacks.  It  came  in  the  end  to  receive  more  of  their  inroads 
than  any  other  of  the  Irish  kingdoms;  and  probably  contained, 
after  their  final  settlement,  a  larger  infusion  of  Norse  blood 
than  any  other  part  of  Ireland  (though  that  was  not  great T ). 

The  Over- King  of  Ireland  was  still  called  King  of  Tara; 
though  at  this  moment  his  throne  was  at  Derry — not  even  in 
the  kingdom  of  Meath,  where  Tara  stood,  and  though  Tara 
never  more  contained  the  palace  of  the  Ard-Ri.  *  Tara's  halls/ 
it  is  to  be  feared,  had  long  grown  silent.     And  this  was  no 

*  Cf.  Joyce,  Irish  Names  of  Places,  p.  100  sqq. 


i9o  THE  VIKINGS  IN  IRELAND. 

small  matter.  Not  because  there  was  any  particular  magic 
about  the  name  of  one  capital  rather  than  that  of  another,  but 
because  in  ancient  days  the  greatest  market  in  all  Ireland  had 
been  held  at  this  place,  the  one  great  national  assembly  which 
the  people  enjoyed.  To  have  the  command  of  the  market 
\\  as,  as  it  were,  to  have  the  command  of  the  purse-strings  \  for 
ihe  king  who  dominated  Tara  with  his  army  might  exact  such 
tolls  and  dues  as  he  pleased.  In  those  days,  too,  the  great 
annual  or  triennial  fairs  held  at  Tara,  or  wherever  they  might 
be,  constituted  the  very  life  of  the  nation.  At  them  took  place 
not  only  a  buying  and  selling,  but  assemblies  of  notabilities, 
passing  of  laws — or  interpretations  of  laws — and  so  forth.  So 
that  historians  are  right  in  dating,  in  a  great  degree,  the  decline 
of  the  power  of  the  Irish  over-kings  from  the  decay  of  Tara 
and  the  silencing  of  its  harps. 

Up  to  the  year  807  the  Vikings  had  not  touched 

A.D.  807.  . 

upon  the  mainland  of  Ireland.  Indeed,  so  far  as 
the  records  tell  us,  each  attempt  of  theirs  to  establish  them- 
selves upon  the  mainland  of  any  country  had,  up  till  that  year, 
proved  unsuccessful.  They  had  succeeded  on  the  Island  of 
Lindisfarne ;  they  had  failed  upon  the  Northumbrian  coast  at 
Wearmouth.  They  had  been  beaten  in  Glamorganshire,  but 
they  had  succeeded  in  Rechain,  in  Man,  in  Iona,  and  in  In- 
nishmurray.  Now,  however,  they  broke  the  spell.  Shortly 
after  their  attack  on  the  last  place,  they  landed  in  Sligo 
and  harried  the  country  far  and  wide.1  And  after  that,  fleet 
seemed  to  follow  fleet  in  quick  succession ;  so  that  we  soon 
hear  of  the  Vikings  plundering  and  exploring  all  down  the 
western  coast  of  Ireland ;  now  carrying  on  their  depredations 
with  little  hindrance,  now  encountered  and  defeated  by  the 

1  F.  M.  802  (Ed.  O'Donovan,  i.  413)  ;  Annals  of  Ulster  806  (O'Conor, 
Scrip.  Rev.  Hib.  iv.  196  ;  Hennessy  (Irish  Rolls  Series),  vol.  i.  293). 


TWO  ROUTES  OF  VIKING  ADVENTURE.         191 

inhabitants:  slaughtered  by  Ulstermen  in  811;  marauding 
down  the  west  coast  in  812;  in  Mayo,  in  Connaught,  and 
down  as  far  as  Cork  harbour;  and  once  again  in  the  more 
southern  parts  near  Killarney.1 

In  812  they  met  with  rather  a  decisive  defeat  at  the  hands 
of    the    Eoghanachts   of  Loch    Lein    (Killarney), 
which    was    noised   abroad    in    Northern    Europe, 
and  joyfully  recorded  by  Einhard  over  at  the  Court  of  Charles 
the  Great.2     Howbeit  next  year  the  marauders  were  successful 
in  another  engagement  with  the  men  of  Owless.3 

Then  came  a  pause  of  seven  years  ;  and  it  may  have  been 
about  this  time  that  a  change  took  place  in  the  nationality  of 
the  Vikings  who  came  to  Ireland. 

Before  the  Viking  history  has  advanced  far  we  begin  to 
detect  two  series  of  northern  piracies,  taking  two  different 
routes.  One  route  was  a  coast  voyage  :  down  the  west  coast 
of  Denmark  to  Frisia;  from  Frisia  to  Francia — Neustria,  that  is 
to  say — or  to  the  opposite  side  of  the  English  Channel,  to  our 
own  coasts,  through  the  English  Channel  to  the  mouths  of  the 
great  rivers  of  Francia,  the  Seine,  the  Loire,  the  Garonne ; 
later  still,  to  the  west  coast  of  Spain,  and  through  the  Straits 
of  Gibraltar  to  the  Mediterranean.  Or,  supposing  the  pirates 
to  have  made  their  way  to  England,  they  might  sail  north  to 
East  Anglia  or  North umbria,  or  south  by  west  round  the  coast 
of  Kent  to  Sussex,  to  Wessex,  possibly  up  through  St.  George's 
Channel  to  Wales,  to  Ireland,  to  Man,  to  Iona.  All  these 
different  expeditions  might  diverge  from  one  original  route. 

1  Ann.  Ult.  s.a.  810;  ibid.  811  ;  F.  M.  807. 

2  Ann.  Ult.  811;  F.  M.  807;  Gaedhil  and  Gaill,  c.  iv. ;  Einhard, 
Ann.  812  ;  Ann.  Fuld.  812. 

3  F.  M.  808  ;  Ann.  Ult.  812.  Tt  will  be  seen  that  the  Irish  chronicles 
are  very  uncertain  as  to  date.  The  Annals  of  Ulster  are  generally  the 
most  trustworthy,  and  especially  so  for  Viking  raids  in  the  north  of  Ireland. 


192  THE  VIKINGS  IN  IRELAND. 

But  there  was  another  route  which  went  straight  across  the 
North  Sea,  from  the  Norway  coast  we  may  suppose,  to  the 
north  of  Scotland,  to  the  Shetlands  and  Orkneys,  down  to 
the  Scottish  coast,  then  round  by  Western  Scotland,  by  the 
Hebrides,  by  Iona,  to  Ireland,  where  it  would  meet  with  the 
other  current,  supposing  any  stream  thereof  to  be  flowing  at 
the  time.  Or,  again,  this  current  of  invasion  might  flow  north- 
ward from  the  Shetlands  to  the  Faroes,  beyond  the  Faroes  as 
far  as  Iceland.  An  Irish  monk,  writing  in  a.d.  825,1  says  that 
even  at  that  day  many  colonies  of  Irish  monks  in  the  islands 
of  the  North  Atlantic  had  been  uprooted  and  destroyed  by 
the  pirates  from  the  north ;  so  by  a.d.  825  we  may  be  sure 
that  both  routes  were  in  full  use. 

But  not,  I  suspect,  much  earlier.  It  is  natural  to  suppose 
that  the  coasting  voyage  was  the  earliest  made,  and  that  it 
continued  to  the  last  to  be  the  most  frequented.  I  am  myself 
disposed  to  attribute  all  the  earliest  Viking  raids  to  adventurers 
who  had  come  this  way ;  and  I  will  guess  that  the  first  attacks 
upon  Ireland,  which  came  from  the  far  north,  are  those  which 
we  are  about  to  record.2  These  renewed  attacks  begin  in  a.d. 
820,  about  the  time,  as  we  have  just  seen,  that  other  Viking 
fleets  were  plundering  and  slaughtering  in  the  Shetlands  and 
Faroes.  The  Vikings  who  came  by  the  coasting  route  would 
naturally  be  chiefly  Danes,  and  we  may  be  almost  sure  that 
Danes  were  in  the  majority  in  the  fleets  which  sailed  to  Eng- 
land and  to  Continental  Europe.  In  Ireland,  upon  the  con- 
trary, the  Norsemen  had,  for  some  time  after  a.d.  820,  the  field 
to  themselves,  and  the  traces  of  Nt>rse  language  in  Ireland  and 
Scotland  are  much  more  numerous  than  the  traces  of  Danish. 3 

1  Decuil,  De  Men  sura  Orbis  Terrartim. 

2  Thus  the  fleet  which  attacked  Ireland  in  812  is  called  in  Ann.  Fuldens. 
'  Classis  Danorum.'  Much  the  same  is  the  view  maintained  by  Steenstrup 
in  his  Normanneme. 

3  See  Joyce,  Irish  Names  of  Places. 


EARL  Y  A  TTA  CKS.  193 

The  Irish  at  the  beginning  designated  their  new  invaders  by 
the  name  of  foreigners  (Gaill)  simply.  In  time  they  began  to 
distinguish  the  Gaill  into  two  sections  or  two  nationalities — the 
Finn-Gaill,  or  white  strangers,  and  the  Dubh-Gaill,  or  black 
strangers.  What  the  foundation  for  this  distinction  was  wt 
cannot  tell ;  for  there  is  really  no  racial  difference  of  type  be- 
tween the  Norsemen  and  the  Danes.  It  is,  however,  certain 
that  by  the  names  Finn-Gaill  and  Dubh  Gaill  the  Irish  meant 
to  separate  these  two  Scandinavian  peoples. 


The  attacks,  then,  began  once  more  in  820.     In     .  _    M 
'  .    .  A.D.  820. 

this  year  and  the  next  Viking  fleets  appeared  upon 

all  sides  of  Ireland.     They  plundered  in  Cork  harbour  and  in 

Beggary  Island,  off  the  Wexford  coast ;  and  thence  they  sailed 

to  Howth,  near  Dublin  :z  a  place  we  note  which.     .  _    M 

r  A.D.  822. 

like  Lambey,  has  got  its  name  from  the  Northmen 

— hoveS,   a  head.      They  did   not  disdain    to  fall  upon  the 

barren  Skellig  Michil,   which  stood   off  the   coast  of  Kerry, 

fronting   the  Atlantic  waves,  and  to  carry  off  its 

one   inhabitant,    a   solitary  hermit    (Etgall),    who 

died  in  their  hands2;  no  more  than  they  shrank  from  attacking 

one   of  the    most    famous    religious   communities   of  North 

Ireland,  Bangor  (Bennchair),  on  the  coast  of  Down. 3 

At  first,   of   course,   their  attacks   were  chiefly 

1  T.  AD-     825      ? 

upon  places  on  or  near  the  coast.     But  it  was  not 
long  before  they  ventured  far  inland.     We  can  see  them  land- 
ing in  Wexford  Bay,  and  marching  thence  west  to  Taghmon, 

1  Plunder  of  Edar  (Howth)  by  the  Gaill,  who  carried  off  a  great  booty  of 
women,  Four  Masters,  819  (O'Donovan  i.  430).  Cf.  Gaill,  v.  ;  Ann.  Ult. 
820.  The  year  is  that  of  Coenwulf  of  Mercia's  death,  A.D.  822?  Cf. 
Theopold,  Kril.  Unters.  p.  24. 

8  Ann.  Ult.  823  (824?     Steenstrup,  823). 

3  F.  M.  822  (O'Donovan  i.  434).  Ann.  Ult.  822  and  823.  Chron. 
Scot.  (Hennessy),  p.  132.     Gaill,  vi. 

14 


194  THE  VIKINGS  IN  IRELAND. 

which  now  lies  on  the  high  road  from  Wexford  to  New  Ross ; 
from  Taghmon  (probably  through  Old  Ross)  to  St.  Mullin's, 
which  lies  upon  the  river  Barrow.  Then  northward  by  boat  to 
Leighlin  Bridge  and  into  the  Ossory  country  from  there;  or 
else  straight  across  country  to  Inistioge,  upon  the  river  Nore. 
At  Inistiogue  this  band  was  met  by  a  hosting  of  Ossory  men 
and  defeated,  or  at  least  checked  in  its  advance.1  So  back 
they  made  their  way  as  best  they  could  to  Waterford,  embarked 
there  and  sailed  far  round  the  coast  until  they  came  to  You- 
ghall  harbour  and  the  mouth  of  the  Blackwater.  Well  screened 
by  the  leafy  banks  of  this  river  they  made  up-stream  westwards 
to  Lismore.  There  was  a  monastery  there.  This  and  the 
church  of  St.  Molaise  (now  Kilmolash),  five  miles  off,  they 
plundered.  Then  to  their  boats  again  and  back  to  sea,  and 
round  to  Kinsale  Bay,  from  whence  they  fell  upon  Dunderrow 
and  Inishannon,  two  other  rich  foundations  not  far  from  the 
coast.  Finally  we  hear  of  their  fleet  at  Kilpeacon,  in  the 
Limerick  county.  In  this  raid,  the  chronicle  says,  the  heathen 
men  utterly  demolished  Lismore,  Dunderrow,  Inishannon, 
and  Disert  Tipraite — a  place  not  identified.2  Let  this  one 
specimen  of  a  Viking  raid  suffice.  But  they  were  as  active  in 
the  north  as  in  the  south  ;  only  we  notice  with  some  satisfac- 
tion (if  only  as  a  change)  that  once  the  Ulstermen  gained  a 
rather  important  victory  over  the  Vikings.  We  have  no  details. 
It  is  only  '  a  victory  of  the  Ulstermen  over  the  Gaill  at  Lecale, 
in  which  very  many  men  fell. '3 

We  must  take  note  that  in  the  same  year  a  Viking  fleet  fell 
once  more  upon  Iona.  The  island,  we  see,  had  got  back 
its  community  of  monks,   since  the  terrible  attack  eighteen 

1  Exactly  what  happened  is  by  no  means  certain.  Attn.  Ult.  824,  F.  M. 
(823)  and  Cliron.  Scot.  I.e.  speak  of  a  defeat  of  the  Os^orymen,  which  may 
or  may  not  be  identical  with  the  battle  fought  during  the  raid  of  A.D.  825 
(See  War  of  the  Gaedhil  with  the  Gaill,  vii.). 

2  Gaill,  vii.  3  f.  j\f.  823 ;  Ann.  Ult.  824. 


B  LATH  MAC.  195 

years  before.  And  among  the  brothers  was  one  Blathmac,1 
who  had  joined  them  in  the  special  hope  of  finding  martyrdom 
at  the  hands  of  the  Northmen;  a  hope  which  was  now  realized. 
While  his  comrades  sought  to  hide  themselves,  he  went  forward 
to  meet  the  invaders,  and  was  cut  down  by  Viking  swords  ; 
and  his  memory  was  kept  green  (for  a  little  while)  by  a  po.t 
and  monk  of  those  days,  Walafrid  Strabo  by  name,  away  in 
Reichenau,  upon  the  shores  of  Lake  Constance.2 

The  chief  fury  of  the  Viking  attack  seems  at  this  time  to 
have  fallen  upon  the  south,  upon  the  Bandon  and  Blackwater, 
upon  Cork  harbour,  and  the  mouth  of  the  Shannon,  and 
generally  upon  the  kingdom  of  Munster.  They  plundered  the 
greater  part  of  the  churches  of  Erin,  says  a  chronicler,  who 
writes  principally  of  the  southern  kingdom. 3 

In  raids  too  many  to  recount,  in  varied  successes  and  failures 
of  the  invaders,  the  years  passed  on,*  till  831-832, 
when  the  Vikings  took  a  new  departure,  and  '  ~2' 
under  the  guidance  of  a  man  of  genius,  the  ambition  of  the 
Northerners  aimed  at  higher  achievements,  at  something  like  a 
definite  conquest  of  Ireland — or  a  part  of  it.  The  chronicles 
tell  us  that  in  831,  or  832,5  a  'great  royal  fleet'  came  to  the 

1  Ult.  824,  '  Blaimhicc  mac  Flainn  ' ;  F.  M.  823  ;  Chron.  Sc.  I.e.  ; 
Skene,  Celt.  Scot.  a.d.  825  ;  Steenstrup,  A7 or  manner  ne,  ii.  35,  A.D.  824. 

2  Migne  T.  114,  col.  1043-6. 

3  Gaill,  vii.  (see  Introd.  xxxvi. )  ;  cf.  F.  M.  820  and  822  ;  Ult.  824  ;  Ch. 
Scot.  825. 

4  '  The  destruction  of  Dun-Laighin  '  [the  fort  of  the  Leinster  men],  in 
which  Conal,  King  of  Fortrenn,  was  slain  '  {An.  Ult.  826).  '  Battle  at  Kil- 
more  '  {Id.).  'Fearful  battle  fought  by  Lethlobar,  King  of  Dalriada,  against 
the  Gentiles  '  {A.  U.  827  ;  cf.  F.  M.  S26).  '  Battle  gained  over  the  foreigners 
by  Cairbre,  lord  of  Ui-Ceinnsealaigh '  (F.  M.  S26).  '  Plundering  in  Louth 
and  capture  of  Maelbrighde,  king  of  the  country '  {A.  U.  830  ;  F.  M.  829). 

5  I  have  given  an  earlier  date  to  the  coming  of  Turgesius'  '  great  royal  fleet' 
than  is  given  by  Munch, Todd,  or  Steenstrup.  Todd  gives  A.D.  839;  (but  830? 
Introd.)  ;  Steenstrup,  A.  D.  836;  Munch,  a.d. 838.  As  Caz'/Zdistnctly  says  that 
Armagh  was  plundered  thrice  in  one  month  by  Turgesius's  Vikings,  and  as 
the  F.  M.  place  the  plundering  of  Armagh  thrice  in  one  month  in  the  year 


196  THE   VIKINGS  IN  IRELAND. 

north  of  Ireland.     Its   flagship  bore   the   ensign  of  a  certain 
Turgesius  or  Thorgisl. 

By  this  time  the  Finn  Gaill  had,  we  may  believe,  well-estab- 
lished themselves  in  the  Shetlands  and  Orkneys,  and  down  the 
western  coast  of  Scotland.  We  have  no  record  of  their  deeds 
in  these  places  ;  only  we  know  that,  as  they  passed,  they  blasted 
the  little  communities  or  solitary  hermitages  of  monks,  among 
the  islands  and  down  the  coast.  And  that  when  history  gets 
sight  of  these  regions  again,  the  hundreds  of  religious  settle- 
ments have  disappeared  ;  and  in  their  place  the  Norsemen  have 
established  forts  and  treasuries,  whither  to  bring  their  booty 
and  to  refit  their  wrecked  barques. 

This  great  expedition  which  Thorgisl  led  into  North  Ireland 
we  may  be  pretty  sure  steered  down  from  the  Scottish  islands. 
The  fleet  made  its  way  (up  the  Bann  ?  J)  to  Lough  Neagh,  and 
in  this  lough  the  Vikings  gained  a  signal  victory  over  the 
Irish — in  their  poor  coracles,  most  likely.  Then  they  plundered 
the  neighbouring  country,  and  finally  fell  upon  the  greatest 
religious  establishment  of  all  Ireland,  Ard-Macha,  or  Armagh. 
Armagh  might  call  itself  then,  what  it  still  is,  the  Primacy  of 
all  Ireland.  Here  dwelt  the  chief  Comarb  (or  heir)  of  St. 
Patrick,  the  first  priest  of  his  family  or  clan,  his  spiritual 
successor  and  his  heir  in  the  flesh  also.  This  first  plundering 
of  Armagh  by  the  '  Gentiles  '  took  place  in  832.  But  it  was 
not  long  the  only  one ;  for  the  place  was  ravaged  thrice  in  one 
month,  and  finally  the  ill-starred  '  chief  heir  of  St.  Patrick ' 
(Forannan  his  name)  had  to  flee  away,  he  and  his  relics,  out  of 
his  native  land  altogether,  and  migrate  to  the  south-west — the 
Munster  district.     There,  after  wandering  for  some  time   for- 

830  and  Ult. ,  in  83 1 ,  there  seems  every  reason  to  take  ours  as  the  date  of 
the  advent  of  Thorgisl.  We  must  note,  too,  the  great  increase  in  the  Viking 
plunderings  reported  in  An.  Ult.  and  the  F.  M.  from  A.D.  831  onwards. 
Storm,  I  gather,  would  agree  to  the  date  I  have  given  (Bidrag,  &c,  p.  24), 
x  Steenstrup,  0.  c.  ii.  107. 


TURGESIUS.  197 

lornly  enough,  he  was  picked  up  by  another  body  of  Vikings 
who  happened  to  be  plundering  in  those  parts.1  One  may  in 
these  determined  attacks  upon  Armagh  suspect  Thorgisl  and 
his  followers  of  some  more  definite  hostility  to  the  native 
Church  than  was  implied  by  mere  raids  upon  rich  shrines — we 
may  suspect  this  in  the  light  of  some  of  Thorgisl's  subsequent 
proceedings. 

Meantime  other  expeditions  made  their  way  into  Ireland  by 
the  east  and  joined  forces  with  the  army  of  Thorgisl.  A  fleet 
came  to  Louth,  plundered  in  Louth  and  Meath  (at  Duleek).  A 
victory  was  gained  over  the  Northern  Vikings  in  Derry  in  833. 2 
But  this  did  not  effectually  hinder  their  advance  nor  the  consoli- 
dation of  the  Viking  forces.  We  have  a  long  catalogue  of  the 
descents  and  plunderings  all  round  the  Irish  coasts  in  those 
years  833-4,  in  fact  on  to  840 — ravaging  of  the 
monasteries  of  Louth,  the  burning  (for  the  first  time) 
of  Clonmicnois,3  that  great  literary  monastery  in  Central  Ireland. 
The  expeditions,  we  see,  had  begun  to  spread  far  inland,  and 
the  monasteries  in  the  lakes  to  share  the  fate  of  those  upon 
the  sea-coast.  We  read  of  the  ravaging  of  Ferns  and  Clonmore 
in  8^.     This  last  was  on  Christmas  night ;  *  the  .  _ 

.    °  .  .  A.D.   835-6. 

Vikings  having  now  taken  a  firm  footing  in  the 
island,  cease  to  be  only  summer  visitors  :  a  plundering  and  burn- 
ing of  Mount  Garret  and  Drom-h  Ing  (Dromin?);  and  in  the 
next  year  plunderings  in  Kildare  and  the  'first  plundering  of  East 
Bregia '  (Bray  s)  In  836  or  837  came  two  fleets,  each  of  sixty 
sail,  one  up  the  Boyne,  the  other  up  the  Liffey.6    At  first  the 

1  An.  Ult.  844. 

9  An.  Ult.  F.  M.  832.    [First  year  of  Njaill  Caille,  i.e.,  833.] 

3  An.  Ult.  833  and  834.  The  place  is  called  indifferently  Cluainmic- 
Nois  and  Cluain-mac-Nois,  Clonmicnois  or  Clonmacnois.  Cluain -muc- 
Nois,  Chr.  Sc.  4     An.  Ult.  834  ;  F.  M.  835. 

s   Ult.  835,  probably  by  the  Liffey  fleet  of  sixty  sail. 

Ult.  835,  F.  M.  835.     Here  is  a  sort  of  summary  of  the  plunderings  by 


6 


198  THE   VIKINGS  IN  IRELAND. 

men  of  Bray  were  victorious  ;  but  their  successes  did  not  count 

for  much,  and  in  837  or  838  we  read  of  an  event  which  is  worth 

rememberins; :  the  first  taking  of  Ath-Cliath  by  the 
A  D    838  00  j 

Gentiles — Ath-Cliath  being  the  forerunner  of  the 

Dublin  of  our  days.1 

The  town  and  seaport  of  Dublin,  like  Limerick,  like  Water- 
ford  and  Wexford,  and  like  many  other  of  the  seaport  towns  of 
Ireland,  was  a  city  of  Viking  foundation.  The  Dubli-Linn 
('  Black-pool  '—English  Blackpool,  or  Liverpool  if  you  like) 
was  a  particular  spot  in  the  Liffey,  close  to  '  the  ford  of 
hurdles,'  for  that  is  the  meaning  of  Ath-Cliath.  A  fort  had 
been  built  to  protect  the  ford,  and  in  the  hands  of  the  Vikings, 
the  fort  expanded  to  become  the  great  port  and  capital  of 
Ireland.  Henceforth  Dublin  was  often  taken  and  retaken  by 
the  Northmen  and  the  Irish,  but  it  remained  in  the  end  the 
most  important  of  the  Norse  settlements  in  Ireland.  It,  with 
Limerick  and  Waterford,  eventually  constituted  the  three 
Norse  kingdoms  in  Ireland. 

We  have  in  connection  with  these  raids  in  the  east  of  Ire- 
land the  name  of  another  Viking  leader  beside  Thorgisl  (or 
Turgesius),  Saxulf,  namely,  who  probably  commanded  one  of 
the  fleets  just  spoken  of,  and  who,  after  ravaging  for  a  while  in 
the  Kildare  and  Meath  districts,  was  slain  by  the  Irish.2     No 

various  bodies  of  the  Gaill  more  or  less  under  the  direction  of  Thorgisl 
835-840:- 

Thorgisl  came  to  Armagh,  brought  his  fleet  to  Lough  Ree,  and  ravaged 
both  Meath  and  Connaught. 

Plundering  of  Clonmicnois  (near  Lough  Ree). 
,,  Clonfert  (Gal way). 

,,  Lethra  (Tipperary). 

,,  Terriglas  (Tipperary). 

,,  Innis  Celtra  (Inniscattery,  at  the  mouth  of  the  Shannon), 

with  its  seven  churches. 

And  all  the  churches  of  Lough  Derg.     Comp.  Gaill,  xi. ;  An.  Ult.  836. 

Lough  Erne,  F.  M.  and  An.  Ult.  836. 

1  F.  M.  837  ;  G.  xii.  .  a  An.  Ult.  836. 


TAKING  OF  LETHCU1NN.  199 

doubt  the  chief  stress  of  these  attacks  was  felt  in  the  north  and 
in  the  east  of  Ireland.  But  there  were  plenty  more  in  the  west 
and  south,  and  inland  among  the  monasteries  which  stood  on 
islands  of  the  inland  loughs.  There  were  ravagings  in  Con- 
naught,1  and  again  south  in  Limerick — a  long  succession  of 
raids,  in  one  of  which  the  unhappy  Forannan,  Archbishop  of 
Armagh,  was  captured  and  his  shrine  destroyed.2  These 
different  accounts  are  difficult  to  sift ;  and  we  cannot  always 
distinguish  the  Viking  ravages  from  those  which  were  inflicted 
by  one  Irish  king  upon  another.  For,  alas  !  the  internal 
strifes  were  in  no  degree  allayed  by  these  outward  dangers  to 
the  state. 

We  hear  of  some  victories  of  the  Irish — a  victory  of  the 
Tir  Connell  at  Asseroe,3  of  the  Dal  Cais,  on  Lough  Derg,  of 
the  Southern  O'Neill  in  Ardhaccan  in  Meath.4  Possibly  this 
was  the  same  battle  in  which  Saxwulf  was  slain.  But  these 
victories  were  profitless.  The  Vikings  continued  to  advance 
and  to  make  firmer  their  foothold  in  the  northern  division  of 
Ireland. 

As   the  upshot   of  all  these  attacks,  we  find 

.  A.D.  843or844 

Thorgisl  and  his  followers  actually  taking  posses- 
sion of  all  the  northern  half  of  Ireland,  Lethcuinn,  just  as,  in 
after  years,  Halfdan  and  Guthorm  ard  their  Danes  possessed 
themselves  of  the  northern  and  eastern  parts  of  England. 
When  he  had  settled  himself  in  Lethcuinn,  Thorgisl,  who  had 
already  done  away  with  Armagh,s  now  finally  turned  the  monks 

1  F  M.  836.  2  An.  Ult.  834,  844. 

3  GaiH,  xxi.  (misdated  ?) ;  F.  M.  836. 

4  Gaill,  xxi.  [Z^S,  Todd]  ;  Ult.  836  speaks  also  of  a  victory  over  the 
northern  O'Neil. 

5  There  are  many  more  plunderings  in  Lough  Neagh  mentioned  in  the 
years  839-841.  An.  Ult.  has  the  entry,  'The  Lochlanns  {i.e.,  Norsemen) 
came  into  Ireland  for  the  first  time  secundum  chronicon?  (a.  839),  and  if  we 
accept  this,  we  must  suppose  that  the  first  Norsemen  were  of  Thorgisl's 
fleetj  and  that  he  now  first  came  into  Ireland. 


200  THE  VIKINGS  IN  IRELAND. 

out  of  Clonmicnois  and  set  up  his  wife  Ota  there  as  a  kind  of 
Vala  or  Priestess.  At  any  rate  the  chroniclers  give  us  a 
picture  of  Ota  seated  on  the  high  Altar  of  Clonmicnois  and 
1  giving  her  answers  '  from  it  (843) * — a  single  picture  gleam- 
ing out  of  the  darkness  which  surrounds  the  Viking  settlements 
in  Ireland,  and  one  which  may  signify  much  for  us.2 

This  was  a  memorable  event,  the  establishment  of  something 
very  like  a  Norse  kingdom  over  one  half  of  Ireland.  By  it 
Thorgisl  anticipated  by  half  a  century  the  course  of  Viking 
conquest  in  other  countries.  Everywhere  the  history  of  these 
raids  is  much  the  same.  It  begins  with  isolated  attacks,  as  a 
support  to  which  some  island  near  the  coast  is  seized,  which 
becomes  a  refuge  and  an  arsenal  and  treasury  for  the  invaders. 
Anon  they  venture  further  and  further  inland.  They  had  been 
like  the  swallows,  only  summer  visitants  ;  soon  we  find  them  at 
all  times  of  the  year.  In  the  case  of  Ireland,  for  instance,  we 
can  for  the  first  time  detect  the  Northmen  wintering  in  the 
country  in  835.  But  it  is  probable  that  when  once  Thorgisl's 
great  expedition  had  landed  it  did  not  again  return.  We  first 
hear  of  the  Vikings  wintering  in  France  in  843  and  in  England 
in  the  year  851.  The  next  stage  is  when  the  Vikings  think 
not  only  of  settling  in  the  country  and  living  on  their  plunder, 
but  of  conquering  and  colonizing  some  large  part  of  it.  And 
it  is  here  that  Thorgisl's  Vikings  so  far  outstripped  those  in 
other  countries.  The  taking  of  Con's  half  of  Ireland  fell  in 
843  or  844.  In  878,  by  the  Peace  of  Wedmore,  the  English 
Danes  were  for  the  first  time  settled  in  like  fashion  in  the 
Danelag.3  The  settlement  of  the  Danes  of  Rolf  in  France 
and  the  final  establishment  of  a  Norman  state  there  did  not  take 
place  till  the  ensuing  century  in  912. 

1  Gaedh.  and  Gaill,  p.  xlix.  9,  224-27.  ■  See  Chapter  II. 

3  Or  we  may  perhaps  call  the  year  875  the  year  of  the  Danish  settlement 
in  England. 


TAKING  OF  LETHCUINN.  201 

Lethcuinn,  or  Con's  half,  where  Thorgisl  had  seated  himself, 
was  the  home  of  the  most  warlike  and  powerful  of  all  the  Irish 
clans,  the  Hy-Njall,  or  O'Neil.  What,  we  may  ask,  were  the 
Irish  kings  and  chieftains  doing  to  allow  the  Norsemen  to  gain 
such  a  footing  in  Ireland  ?  And  we  must  sorrowfully  answer  that 
they  were  fighting  among  themselves.  In  the  first  place,  during 
nearly  all  the  time  of  Thorgisl's  reign  (so  to  call  it)  there  was  a 
smouldering  or  active  hostility  between  the  King  of  Munster 
and  the  over-king  of  Ireland.  The  latter  was  Njall  Caille  of 
the  northern  Hy-Njall.  The  King  of  Munster,  Felim  x — the 
two  Munsters  seem  to  have  been  united  just  then  under  one 
sceptre — was  an  ecclesiastical  dignitary  as  well  as  a  political. 
He  was  Archbishop  of  Cashel ;  and  ir  was  the  object  of  his  policy 
to  place  Cashel  on  a  par  with  Armagh,  South  Ireland  equal  in 
every  respect  with  North  Ireland.  Before  Thorgisl  began  his 
attacks  upon  Armagh  the  King  of  Munster  had  begun  his. 
The  objects  of  the  Vikings  coincided  with  Feidhlimidh's 
objects  ;  and  we  have  here  the  example,  which  was  to  be  so 
common  in  after-times,  of  co-operation  between  the  Gaill  and 
the  Gaedhill — the  stranger  and  the  native — for  the  oppression 
of  another  Irish  tribe  or  kingdom. 

III. 

The  ambition  of  these  Vikings  was  not  confined  to  Ireland, 
but  stretched  to  the  neighbouring  island  of  Britain.  More 
than  a  generation  had  passed  since  the  great  raids  on  Lindis- 
farne  and  Yarrow,  and  the  country  had  had  leisure  to  forget 
its  troubles.  The  supremacy  among  the  heptarchic  kingdoms 
had  finally  passed  from  Mercia  to  Wessex.  Offa  was  reigning 
when   the  first   pirate  ships  struck   the   English  coast ;    now 

1  Feidhlimidh  {say  Felim)  was  his  z'wmemorable,  apparently  unpronounce- 
able, name.  It  is  not  quite  certain  whether  Thorgisl  or  he  were  the 
plunderers  of  Armagh  on  different  occasions. 


202  THE  VIKINGS  IN  IRELAND. 

Egberht  sat  upon  the  throne  of  Wessex,  and  all  South-Humbria 

had  become  tributary  to  his  kingdom.      Being  a   far-sighted 

ruler,  Egberht  did  not  remain  indifferent  to  the  danger  near  at 

a  ™  qqq     hand,  though  he  had  himself  had  no  experience  of 

A.  1).    ooo . 

the  terrors  of  the  Vikings.     We  find  him  in  833 

calling  together  a  council  (a  Witenagembf)  to  consult  for  the 

defences  of  the  kingdom.     His  measures  were  not  taken  too 

.  ~  „„„     ,*„,.  soon  :  for  two  years  later  a  Viking  fleet — which  we 
A.D.835or836.  J  to 

have  every  reason  to  believe  came  from  Ireland — 

fell  upon  the  coast  of  Kent.   It  came  to  Sheppey,  and,  after  old 

Viking  fashion,  entrenched  itself  upon  the  island.1     One  year 

later,  again,  a    fleet  of  five-and-thirty  sail    fought 

A.D.  836, 

against  the  English  at  Charmouth  in  Dorset  and 
gained  a  victory.2     Anon  the   Vikings   politicly  allied  them- 
selves with  the  West  Welsh,  or  Cornishmen,  always 

A.D.  838.  .  . 

ready  for  an  attack  upon  the  English.  Their 
united  army  was  met  by  Egberht  at  Hengston  and  crushed. 3 
Nor  was  this  king  for  the  remaining  years  of  his  life  further 
troubled  by  the  pirate  attacks.  Still  the  storm  had  begun  once 
more  to  blow  upon  England  and  did  not  again  die  down.  It 
was  forty-five  years  since  the  attack  upon  Lindisfarne ;  it 
would  be  forty  years  more  of  steadily  increasing  Viking  raids 
before  something  like  rest  was  brought  to  this  land  by  the 
Peace  of  Wed  more. 

And  now  it  seems  some  change  for  the  better  took  place 

in  the  internal  politics  of  Ireland.     It  was  still  the 

A.D.  845.  . 

reign  of  Njall  Caille  on  whom  the  King  of  Munster 
and  the  Norsemen  had  pressed  so  hard.  But  now  Njall  had 
recovered  something  of  his  power.  We  read  of  a  great  victory 
gained  by  him  at  Ith  over  the  Vikings  (84s).4  And  at  the 
same   time    there    arose    among   the    southern    O' Neils,   the 

1  A.  S.  Chron.  a.  833,  and  cf.  Numism.  Ckr.,  1882,  p.  61,  sqq. 

2  Ibid.  833  (4).  3  ibid.  835.  4  An.  Ult.  844. 


DEATH  OF  TURGESIUS.  203 

O'Neils  of  Meath,  a  famous  champion  of  the  name  of  Malachy 
(Maelsechlain).1  He  is  Malachy  I. — not  the  Malachy  of  the 
collar  of  gold  in  Moore's  song,  who  reigned  as  Malachy  III.  a 
century  and  a  half  later  \  but  he  was  not  less  celebrated  in  his 
day.  He  and  a  certain  vassal  of  his,  Tighernach,  '  lord  '  of 
Loch  Gabhar  in  Meath,  may  be  counted  the  chief  champions 
of  the  Irish  at  this  time.  And  next  to  these*  two,  Cearbhall, 
King  of  Ossory  ;  as  on  the  other  hand  Felim,  King  of  Munster, 
was  the  chief  ally  of  the  Norsemen.  In  845  Malachy  by 
some  means — by  victory  or  treachery — got  hold  of  the  person  of 
Thorgisl  himself,  and  the  great  Norse  king  was  drowned  in 
Loch  Owel  (in  Meath).2  And  with  the  death  of  its  founder 
the  kingdom  of  Lethcuinn  crumbled  away,  For  awhile  all 
went  against  the  Norsemen.  Malachy  (who  had 
now  become  Ard-Ri,  and  so  Malachy  I.)  gained  a 
naval  victory  over  the  Vikings  ;  so  that  we  guess  he  had  been 
constructing  a  fleet  after  their  pattern,  and  anticipating  the 
policy  of  Alfred  the  Great  in  England.  Cearbhall, 

A.D   847 

King  of  Ossory,  gained  an  important  victory  in  847,3 

and  slew  1,200  of  the  Dublin  Vikings.     There  were  victories 

in  Ulster  at  the  same  time ;  and  finally  Malachy 

and  Tighernach  in  concert  attacked  and  took  the 

Norsemen's  stronghold  at  Dublin  in  849. 4 

One  is  glad,  too,  to  read  that  Felim  came  to  a  bad  end  about 
the  same  time.  He  had  been  harrying  the  land  attached  to 
the  Abbey  of  Clonmicnois,  and  dedicated  to  St.  Kieran, 
founder  of  the  abbey.     But  when  he  returned  from  there  to 

1  Or  Maelsechnaill. 

2  An.  lilt.  844,  Gaill.  xv.  '  One  year  before  the  drowning  of  Njall 
Caille  ;  two  years  before  the  death  of  Feidhlimidh.'    Gaill. 

3  F.  M.  845. 

4  Ibid.  847.  I  am  not  sure  that  this  date  is  not  erroneous,  and  that  the 
event  referred  to  is  not  contemporaneous,  and  in  part  connected  with,  the 
coming  of  a  Danish  fleet  into  Irish  waters.    See  next  page,  and  Chapter  XI. 


204  THE  VIKINGS  IN  IRELAND. 

Durlass  the  saint  rose  from  his  grave  to  pursue  him — so  the 
chronicle  says — and  there,  appearing  to  Felim  as  in  a  dream, 
he  gave  him  a  blow  with  his  staff,  whence  sprang  internal 
injuries  from  which  the  king  died.  He  died  on  the  18th  of 
August,  847, x  '  by  the  miracle  of  God  and  Kieran.'  And, 
knowing  what  history  is,  we  are  not  surprised  to  find  that  by 
the  '  Felim  party  '  he  is  described  as  '  the  most  religious  clerk 
in  all  Ireland  during  his  day.' 

Not  that  this  meant  anything  at  all  like  a  cessation  of  the 
Viking  raids.  They  went  on  as  constantly  as  ever,  fresh  fleets 
always  appearing  to  supply  the  losses  of  the  old.  But  the 
invaders  did  not  again  attempt  to  seize  a  large  portion  of  the 
country  and  erect  a  kingdom  there.  We  must  picture  them — 
for  we  cannot  rehearse  the  wearisome  catalogue  of  their  attacks 
during  the  second  half  of  this  Viking  Age — confining  them- 
selves henceforth  chiefly  to  settlements  upon  the  coast,  which 
settlements  were  eventually  grouped  into  three  '  kingdoms  ' 
(so  called) — the  three  Norse  kingdoms  of  Dublin,  Waterford, 
and  Limerick.     After  a  struggle  for  mastery  between  the  two 

a  t»  *x\      nationalities  of  Vikings,   for  the  Danes   revisited 

Ireland  in  85 1,2  the  whole  body  of  Vikings  agreed 

to  acknowledge  a  sort  of  over-king  whose  title  was  no  doubt  a 

a  r»  qk«*     copy  of  that  °f  the  Irish  Ard-Ri,  or  King  of  Tara. 

A. •  JJ .   0O0. 

The  first  of  these  'kings  of  all  the  Northmen  in 
Ireland '  is  a  certain  Olaf  the  White, 3  who  has  his  connections 
with  the  rulers  of  the  Scottish  islands,  the  Earls  of  the 
Hebrides,  and  in  a  remoter  way  with  some  of  the  early  settlers 
in  Iceland.  Authentic  history — that  of  the  Christian  chroniclers 
— almost    turns   away   from   the    Northmen   in   Ireland   and 

1  Probably.     See  Gaill,  xv.  a  Ult.  850,  851.     Gazll,  xx. 

3  F.  M.  851  :  Ann.   Ult.  852. 


NORSE  AND  DANISH  VIKINGS.  205 

Scotland  during  the  latter  part  of  the  ninth  century.  But  on 
the  other  hand  the  Icelandic  traditions  begin  to  take  some 
notice  of  them. 

Before  the  Norsemen  came  the  Irish  had  cared  little  about 
sea-ports  or  the  use  of  fleets.  Their  boats  were  of  the  kind 
known  as  coracles — a  wicker  frame  covered  with  skin.  The 
rudest  and  most  primitive  form  of  the  coracle  is  still  in  use  in 
the  west.  It  is  one  of  those  primitive  constructions  which 
seem  to  belong  to  all  ages  and  all  nations.  We  can  find  an 
exact  parallel  to  it  in  the  boat  described  by  Herodotus  as 
being  in  use  upon  the  Euphrates  six  hundred  years  before  our 
era. 

It  was  to  the  Norsemen  that  Ireland  owed  the  beginning  of  a 
fleet,  and  of  such  commercial  prosperity  as  she  has  ever  had. 
The  Vikings  of  Norse  blood  were,  so  far  as  appears,  of  rather 
a  different  calibre  from  the  Danish  Vikings  of  the  Continent 
and  of  the  later  invasions  of  England.  While  these  last  were 
filled  with  political  ambitions,  were  colonizers  and  conquerors, 
those  were  imbued  with  commercial  notions,  and  were  con- 
querors and  traders.  How  significant  in  this  light  is  the 
discovery  of  a  Viking  interment,  which  was  made  a  year  or 
two  ago  in  the  Hebrides.1  The  man  had  been  boat-buried 
after  the  heathen  rites — though  there  were  likewise  some  traces 
of  Christian  symbolism,  crosses  and  so  forth,  on  the  tomb — 
and  he  had  been  a  warrior  who  had  doubtless  died  in  his 
harness,  which,  with  his  sword,  spear,  and  battle-axe,  was 
placed  by  his  side.  His  horse  had  been  buried  with  him,  and 
one  of  the  big  bones  of  the  horse  had  been  nearly  cut  in  two 
by  a  sword  or  axe — no  doubt  in  the  hero's  last  battle.     But 

1  At  Colonsay,  West  Hebrides.  The  discovery  was  made  by  a  descendant 
of  the  Hy-Njall,  Mr.  Malcolm  M'Niel,  on  the  estate  of  Sir  John  M'Niel,  of 
Colonsay  House.  The  remains  were  exhibited  in  the  Edinburgh  Museum 
of  Science  and  Art  by  Mr.  William  Galloway,  to  whom  I  have  been 
indebted  for  a  description  of  them. 


206  THE  VIKINGS  IN  IRELAND. 

along  with  all  this  war-gear  there  was  found  buried  with 
the  Viking  leader  a  pair  of  scales-  curious  type  of  the  double 
nature  of  his  life  as  a  soldier  and  a  tradesman  !  It  was,  let  it 
be  remembered,  the  Norse  or  Danish  kings  of  Dublin  who, 
about  a.d.  iooo,  introduced  the  first  native  coinage  into 
Ireland,  till  which  date  such  a  medium  of  exchange  was 
almost  unknown  in  this  backward  country. 

Though  there  must  be  less  Scandinavian  blood  in  Ireland 
than  here,  the  Northmen  seem  at  their  first  coming  to  have 
mingled  more  with  the  rest  of  the  people,  identified  them- 
selves more  with  the  national  politics,  so  to  speak,  of  Ireland, 
than  they  did  at  their  first  coming  into  England.  The 
reason  of  this  may  very  well  have  been  the  anarchic  condi- 
tion of  the  former  country,  which,  whatever  the  point  they 
wished  to  attack,  secured  for  the  invaders  some  allies.  Let 
us  note  one  proof  only  of  the  admixture  of  Celtic  and  Scandi- 
navian blood  during  the  Viking  occupation  of  Ireland — the 
extreme  commonness  at  this  very  day  in  all  Scandinavian 
countries  of  the  name  Niel  and  its  derivatives  Neilsson, 
Neilsen,  &c. — our  Nelson  probably.  Yet  that  name  is  not 
Scandinavian,  it  is  true  Irish ;  and  every  Scandinavian  Niel  or 
Njall  from  (or  before)  Burnt  Njall  down  to  our  Niels, 
Nielssons,  and  Nelsons,  must  doubtless  have  had  an  Irish 
ancestor  of  the  race  of  the  northern  or  the  southern  Hy-Njall. 

Cormac  is  another  Irish  or  Celtic  name  which  became 
common  in  Scandinavian  countries,  especially  in  Iceland. 
Such  names  would  spring  from  marriages — which  very  early 
became  fully  recognized — between  the  Vikings  and  the  Irish. 
It  was  not  long  before  many  of  the  wild  Irish  began  to  abjure 
their  Christianity  and  their  old  allegiance,  and  to  embrace  the 
rare  opportunities  for  'agitation,'  which  an  alliance  with  the 
invaders  opened  out.  So  that  there  grew  up  a  new  class  of 
heathen  Irish  who  threw  in  their  lot  with  the  Vikings,  followed 


COMMERCE.  207 

their  standards,  and  fought  against  their  former  kings.     They 
were  known  as  the  Gaill-Gaedhil,  or  Irish  Foreigners. 

On  the  other  hand,  as  we  have  seen,  it  was  the  Vikings  who 
brought  Irish  political  life  down  to  the  sea,  and  taught  the 
Irish,  or  retaught  them,  the  uses  of  navigation  for  purposes  of 
policy  and  business  and  war.  Formerly  the  sea  had  belonged 
only  to  the  religious  life  of  the  country — the  religious  and 
intellectual  life.  The  capital  of  ancient  days  had  lain  in  the 
'  middle  kingdom '  (Meath).  Now  the  Norsemen  brought  it 
down  to  the  coast.  They  crushed  the  monasteries,  expelled 
the  monks  and  clerks  ;  and  learning  and  piety  went  forth 
sorrowing  to  seek  new  homes,  doctors  and  scholars  flocking  in 
immense  numbers  to  the  Continent.  In  the  place  of  the 
religious  homes  grew  up  the  trading  stations  which  the  Norse- 
men erected  all  round  the  coast,  and  which  held  the  germs 
of  a  certain  civilization,  though  of  a  new  kind. 


CHAPTER   VII. 

LEWIS    THE   PIOUS.      THE    CONQUESTS   OF 
CHRISTIANITY. 

I. 

The  year  795,  which  we  may  take  to  be,  as  nearly  as  possible, 
the  real  beginning  of  the  Viking  era  was,  so  it  happens,  like- 
wise the  year  in  which  a  body  of  Irish  monks  first  found  their 
way  as  far  as  Iceland,  till  then  a  desert  island.1  By  so  doing 
they  completed  the  work  of  the  Irish  Church,  and,  so  far  as 
territorial  extension  goes,  the  dominion  of  Christendom  in  the 
West. 

Or  had  they  quite  completed  it?  Long  years  after,  the 
earliest  Norse  settlers  in  Greenland2  heard  tell  from  the  natives 
of  that  place  of  a  settlement  upon  the  coast  '  opposite,'  but  far 
off,  of  a  body  of  strangers  whom  the  Eskimo  described  as 
walking  together  in  processions,  dressed  all  in  white,  carrying 
long  staves  with  cloths  hanging  from  them,  and  sptaking  or 
crying  out  in  a  peculiar  fashion.3     The  '  opposite  coast'  here 

1  This  fact  is  taken  from  Decuilus  De  menstira  orbis  terrarum, 
written  825.  In  that  the  discovery  of  Iceland  is  placed  thirty  years 
earlier. 

2  Towards  the  end  of  the  tenth  century. 

3  poifinns  Saga  Karlsefnis,  c.  p.  162-3,  and  Landnama,  ii.  c.  2.  Quoted 
in  K.  Maurer,  Bekehrung  des  norzv  Statnmes  zum  Chi~istenthume,  i.  p.  47 


IRISH  MONKS  IN  ICELAND  AND  AMERICA.     209 

spoken  of  must  have  been  some  part  of  North  America — that 
Vinland  (Wine-land),  probably,  which  the  Norsemen  afterwards 
discovered  and  partly  settled;  and  in  the  description  given 
by  the  Eskimo  of  these  strangers  has  been  recognized  the 
description  of  Christian  missionaries,  walking  in  processions  in 
their  surplices,  singing,  and  carrying  their  wax  tapers,  their 
crosses,  and  banners. 

It  is  curious  enough  to  think  of  Christian  chants  in  this 
early  age  waking  the  echoes  upon  the  lonely  American  shore. 
Such  processions  and  such  chants  were  at  the  same  time  rising 
from  like  bodies  of  Irish  monks  in  all  the  islands  of  North- 
Western  Europe — the  Orkneys,  the  Shetlands,  the  Faroes, 
Iceland — until  the  Vikings  came  and  silenced  them  for  ever. 
On  this  work  the  red-handed  Norse  sailors  were  even  now 
engaged,  killing  these  ill-starred  'papas,'  'papays,'  whose  swan- 
song,  we  may  hope,  lingered  reproachfully  in  their  ears. 

Somewhere,  then,  between  795  and  the  middle  of  the  ninth 
century,  the  Irish  Missionary  Church  completed  its  work  by 
carrying  Christianity  to  Iceland,  and  (if  we  may  believe  it)  to 
the  coast  of  America ;  and  almost  immediately  there  began  the 
process  of  undoing  its  work  at  the  hands  of  the  Vikings,  who 
were  not  only  now,  in  the  early  years  of  the  ninth  century, 
murdering  all  the  communities  of  monks  whom  they  found 
scattered  over  the  north  seas  and  the  Scottish  coasts  and 
islands,  but  had  already  struck  at  the  very  root  or  fountain- 
head  of  the  '  movement '  in  Ireland  itself.  This  was  their 
first  achievement.     The  next  was  to  attack  in  a  more  direct 


note.  The  country  was  also  called  Hvitramannaland,  or  *  White  Men's 
Land,'  and  Irland  hit  mykla  '  Greater  Ireland.'  In  the  Aarbog  for  nordisk 
Oldkyndighed,  1 887,  there  is  an  interesting  paper  by  Prof.  Sophus  Bugge  on 
Halluland,  Markland,  and  Vinland,  the  three  Scandinavian  settlements  in 
America.  These  three  places  he  identifies,  respectively,  with  Labrador, 
Newfoundland,  and  Nova  Scotia.  It  has  been  usual  to  place  Vinland  much 
further  south,  about  the  State  of  New  York. 


2lo  THE  CONQUESTS  OF  CHRISTIANITY. 

way  the   great   commonwealth  of   Christianity,   the    Frankish 
Empire. 

Towards  Denmark  and  towards  the  Baltic  Christianity  had 
been  extending  her  borders.  It  had  been  a  great  event  when 
Boniface  penetrated  far  into  woody  Hesse  and  founded  in  this 
wild  country  his  monastery  of  Fulda,  throughout  the  Middle 
Ages  one  of  the  most  famous  and  powerful  of  the  religious 
houses  of  Germany.  Fulda  lay  not  far  from  Geismar,  where 
the  oak  of  Thor  had  fallen,  not  far  from  Gudensberg,  or 
Wuotan's-berg  where  the  Fulda  river  joins  the  Weser.  This 
forefront  of  Christendom,  so  soon  as  the  Saxon  resistance  was 
broken  down,  received  many  fresh  supports.  Paderborn  was 
made  into  a  Bishopric.  The  site  of  Paderborn,  we  have  said, 
was  almost  identical  with  the  site  of  Aliso,  and  Aliso  might  be 
called  the  capital  of  the  greater  Roman  Germany  which  sub- 
sisted for  just  twenty  years,  from  a.u.c.  742-762  (b.c.  12 
to  a.d.  9)  ;  from  which  date  the  power  of  the  Old  Empire  in 
the  north  began  to  ebb.  Now,  therefore,  civilization,  Christen- 
dom, or  the  Newr  Empire,  had  won  back  what  the  old  had  lost. 
The  first  two  Bishops  of  Paderborn  were  Saxons  who  had  been 
torn  from  their  heathen  parents  when  young,  and  educated  at 
the  monastery  of  Wirzburg.  Near  the  mouth  of  the  Weser  lay 
two  other  Bishops'  Sees,  Bremen  and  Verden  :  Miinster,  a 
fourth,  lay  between  the  Ems  and  the  Rhine,  comprising  in  its 
diocese  just  that  part  of  Saxony  which  approached  nearest  to 
the  latter  river.  In  the  reign  of  Lewis  Halberstadt  and 
Hildesheim,  between  the  Weser  and  the  Elbe,  and  Hamburg 
at  the  mouth  of  the  Elbe,  were  added  to  the  ecclesiastical 
strongholds.1 

There  was,  besides,  another  way  in  which  the  influences  of 

1  Hamburg  was  built  in  Charlemagne's  reign. 


CONVERTED  DANES.  211 

Christianity  and  civilization  were  spreading  towards  the 
Scandinavian  countries  ;  the  peaceful  road  of  commerce.  The 
greatest  commercial  city  of  Northern  Europe  in  those  days  was 
Dorstad.1  Only  the  site  of  it  can  now  be  discovered  in  the 
little  town  of  Wyk-bij-Duustede,  on  the  Leek  branch  of  the 
Rhine.  It  was,  in  fact,  ruined  by  the  incursions  of  the  Vikings 
into  Frisia  during  the  ninth  century.  But  in  the  earlier  years 
of  this  century  it  still  rose  proudly  out  of  the  plain,  and  boasted 
of  its  many  churches,  its  many  priests,  and,  what  seems  less  a 
matter  for  self-gratulation,  its  many  poor.2  Dorstad  stood  at 
the  edge  of  the  more  civilized  part  of  the  Netherlands.  North 
of  it  the  people  were  poor  and  wild  fishermen  and  peasants. 
It  was  not  long  since  they  had  killed  the  greatest  of  English 
missionaries ;  they  were  still  on  good  terms  with  the  Danes. 
But  south  of  Dorstad  there  had  begun  to  spring  up  those 
manufacturing  industries  for  which  the  Low  Countries  were 
celebrated  all  through  the  Middle  Ages.  The  Danes  on  their 
side,  were  learning  that  love  of  luxury,  and  a  rather  special  love 
of  woven  stuffs  and  wearing  apparel,  which  characterized  the 
later  Vikings.  Before  they  took  to  harrying  Dorstad,  and 
killing  their  goose  with  the  golden  eggs,  many  a  Dane  had  no 
doubt  been  there  in  a  more  peaceful  guise.  Here  they  would 
come  under  the  influence  of  Christian  preaching.  Except 
where  it  amounted  to  an  act  of  submission,  many  heathens 
had  no  objection  to  baptism  when  it  came  'in  the  way  of 
business.' 

The  monk  of  St.  Gall  has  a  story  of  which  we  may  say,  at 
any  rate,  that  it  is  ben  trovato*  On  one  occasion  when  a 
number  of  the  Northmen  presented  themselves  for  baptism,  the 

1  Cf.  K.  Maurer  Bekehrung  des  Nonveg.  Stammes  zum  Christenthtime, 

I.  i-  §  3- 

2  Vita  S.  Anscari  c.    20  (Pertz  ii.   705).      Ibi  sunt  ecclesuz  plurimce  et 

sacerdotes  et  clerici  ;  ibi  indigentium  multitudo. 

3  Gesta  Kar.  M.  ii.  19  (Pertz,  ii    762  ;  Bouquet  v.  134). 


212  THE  CONQUESTS  OF  CHRISTIANITY. 

linen  garments  which  the  newly-baptized  catechumens  wore, 
and,  it  seems,  got  as  a  present,  ran  short.  So  they  had  to  cut 
them  up  into  strips — in  much  the  same  way  no  doubt,  and  upon 
the  same  principle  that  we  may  see,  in  our  day,  a  college  tutor 
as  he  hands  the  graduates  up  to  the  Vice-Chancellor  apportion 
his  hands  into  their  ten  digits  and  each  homager  embrace  a 
thumb  or  single  finger.  One  of  the  Danes  took  this  economy 
in  garments  very  ill,  and  cried  out,  'I  have  been  baptized 
twenty  times,  and  always  before  you  gave  me  an  excellent 
white  garment ;  the  rag  that  you  have  given  me  this  time  is 
more  fit  for  a  swineherd  than  a  soldier.' 

There  might  be  other  reasons  for  conformity.  The  Chris- 
tians would  not  trade  with  the  unbaptized.  In  the  Icelandic 
sagas  we  not  infrequently  read  of  men  who  were  pure  Odin- 
worshippers,  undergoing  the  ceremony  simply  on  this  account. 
But  even  so  they  would  stroll  now  and  then  into  the  Christian 
churches  and  come  under  their  spell. 

II. 

The  Frankish  Empire  had  no  more  trouble  with  the  Danes 
after    the    death    of  Godfred    in    a.d.  810.      The 

A.D.  810. 

great  emperor  died  four  years  later  and  was  suc- 
ceeded by  his  son  Lewis. 

When  great  kings  die  their  work  does  not  die  with  them, 
but  goes  on  through  the  impulse  which  they  gave  and  in  the 
direction  they  determined.  Their  successor  seems  to  contem- 
porary eyes  to  be  carried  to  greater  heights  than  they  have 
attained  ;  for  all  that  his  character  or  fortunes  may  have  in 
them  the  germ  of  decay,  as  certainly  as  the  others'  held  the 
germ  of  growth.  So  it  was  with  the  king  who  now  mounted 
the  throne  of  the  Franks  and  assumed  the  imperial  diadem- — 
Ludovicus  Pius,  Lewis  the  Pious,  Ludwig  der  Fromme,  as  the 
Germans  call  him  \  or  as  the  French,  translating  his  epithet  in 


THE  EMPIRE  OF  LEWIS  THE  PIOUS.  213 

the  classical  sense,    Louis  le  Debonnaire—  Lewis 
the  Kind-hearted. 

The  fabric  was  complete  which  his  ancestors  had  toiled  to 
build.  From  beginnings  modest  enough,  amid  the  flats  and 
marshes  of  the  Low  Countries,  a  single  family  had  risen  by  well- 
defined  steps  until  it  came  to  control  the  destiny  of  all  Western 
Europe — had  risen  through  many  of  its  members  by  just  and 
open  means,  'not  taking  account  in  their  judgments,'  as  is  said 
of  one  of  Lewis's  ancestors,1  -  of  the  difference  between 
poverty  and  wealth,  rendering  to  the  people  the  things  which  are 
the  people's  and  to  Caesar  the  things  which  are  Caesar's;'  in  some 
by  more  questionable  actions.  Of  the  special  four  princes 
whom  we  count  as  the  builders-up  of  the  Carling  House — 
Pippin  of  Heristal,  Charles  Martellus,  Pippin  the  Short,  each 
seems  alone  great  enough  to  be  the  founder  of  a  dynasty,  until 
the  achievements  of  all  are  thrown  into  the  shade  by  those 
of  the  fourth  in  the  category,  Charles  the  Great.  And  now 
the  fifth  in  descent  was  about  to  reap  the  fruit  of  this  slow 
harvest ;  and  in  part  through  his  own  fault,  in  part  through 
the  unkindness  of  Fortune  or  the  operation  of  unseen  and 
inevitable  forces  of  decay,  he  was  about  to  dissipate  all  this 
rich  inheritance. 

As  yet  all  was  well.  Where  Christian  Europe  had  been  a 
congeries  of  hostile  nations,  it  appeared  now  more  like  a  God- 
governed  commonwealth,  at  peace  within  itself,  at  war  only 
with  the  enemy  outside  its  gates.  A  sense  of  security  and 
settlement  was  everywhere  shown.  Men  began  to  build,  to 
plough,  to  plant  gardens,  to  raise  basilicas — constructive  arts 
of  all  kinds  progressed.2 

Only  in  naval  and  military  architecture  they  were  not  so 


1  Pippin  of  Landen.     See  Vie  de  Pepin,  in  Guizot's  Memoires,  6fc, 
9  Violet  le  Due,  Pic,  de  r Architecture,  s.v.  Architecture. 


214  THE  CONQUESTS  OF  CHRISTIANITY. 

active — a  dangerous  omission  with  a  black  cloud  already 
gathering  in  the  north.  In  respect  of  the  latter  there  had  been 
no  real  revival  of  the  art  since  the  days  when  the  Roman 
power  fell.  Such  strong  fenced  cities  as  Northern  Europe 
possessed  were  strong  in  virtue  of  the  Roman  walls  which  still 
stood  round  them ;  palisades  and  rude  earthworks  did  duty 
where  these  were  wanting.1  In  respect  of  naval  architecture, 
no  one  till  just  the  end  of  the  eighth  century  dreamt  of  the 
construction  of  ships  of  war ;  so  peaceful  seemed  all  the  ways  of 
the  sea.  But  when  the  first  Viking  raids  upon  Northumbria 
had  sent  a  thrill  through  Europe,  and  when  Charles  himself 
had  had  some  experience  of  what  these  new  sea  foes  were  like, 
he  lost,  it  must  be  said,  no  time  in  setting  on  foot  the  building 
of  a  navy.2 

Charles's  foresight  had,  indeed,  left  nothing  essential  uncared 
for.  Before  his  death  he  settled  the  succession  to  the  vast 
dominion  which  was  under  his  sway.3  He  had  outlived  many 
of  his  children.  One  son,  Charles,  whom  we  catch  sight  of 
fighting  against  the  Saxons,  had  predeceased  him.  So  had  a 
second  son,  Pippin,  whom  we  have  also  seen  being  anointed 
by  Pope  Adrian  ;  Pippin,  however,  left  a  natural  son  of  his 
own,  Bernard.  Charlemagne's  third4  son,  Lewis,  was  desig- 
nated the  heir  to  the  empire,  and  succeeded  on  the  death  of 
his  father  in  814;  while  Bernard  became  King  of  Italy  :  Italy 
which  included  Carinthia  and  (nominally  at  least)  Pannonia, 

1  Id.  V Architect,  militaire  au  Moyen  Age  ;  and  Diet.  i.  336-337. 

2  Einhard,  Vita,   17  (Pertz,  ii.  452).     Anonymi   Vita  HI.   Pit  Imp.    15 
.(The  Astronomer)  (P.  ii.  614).  The  defences  on  the  Rhone  and  the  Garonne 

of  which  the  Astronomer  makes  mention  were,  however,  not  designed,  as 
he  supposes,  against  the  Northmen,  but  against  the  Mohammedan  Corsairs. 
(See  preceding  chapter,  and  Einhard,  I.e. ) 

3  Thegan,  Vita  Hludovici  Imp.  5  (Pertz,  ii.  591). 

4  Fourth  if  we  include  an  earlier  Pippin,  a  hunchback,  who  is  sometimes 
spoken  of  as  a  bastard,  sometimes  as  legitimate.  On  account  of  his  de- 
formity he  was  never  thought  of  as  a  possible  successor. 


CHA  RA  C  TER  OF  LE  WIS.  2  r  5 

and  the  more  southern  provinces  to  the  Adriatic x — the  Italia 
irredenta  of  to-day. 

During  the  lifetime  of  his  father  Lewis  had  been  made  king 
of  Aquitaine,  and  his  gentle  rule  had  won  to  at  least  a 
temporary  peace  the  quick,  turbulent  inhabitants  of  that 
kingdom.  He  had  restoied  to  the  landholders  of  the  country 
many  estates  whereof  his  grandfather  Pippin  had  deprived 
them.  Wre  have  a  picture  of  him  in  these  days,  adopting  the 
national  costume  of  Aquitaine  to  please  the  people  ;  and  of 
his  iron  father,  when  reports  came  to  him  of  his  son's  success, 
calling  him  to  his  camp  and  embracing  him  in  the  eyes  of  all 
the  Court.2 

Lewis  was  in  these  days  a  great  reader  of  the  Latin  classics  : 
he  gave  up  profane  studies  when  he  became  more  serious  in 
later  life.  He  had  in  truth  had  the  best  education  '  that 
money  could  buy,'  or,  rather,  such  as  no  money  could  have 
bought ;  for  his  tutor  was  William,  Count  of  Toulouse  or  of 
Orange,  a  hero  and  a  saint,  whom  priests  and  people  con- 
spired to  honour.  To  the  one  he  was  St.  William  of  Toulouse ; 
to  the  other  he  was  Guillaume  au  Court-nez,  Guillaume 
Fierebras,  about  whom  and  whose  kin  they  sang  in  after-years 
their  five-and-twenty  Chansons  de  Geste.3  Lewis's  familiarity 
with  literature,  Latin  literature,  must  have  pleased  his  Latin 
subjects.  Charles,  his  father,  had  reverence  enough  for  learn- 
ing, but  he  was  an  opsimathes,  a  'late  learner';  and,  hard 
as  he  worked  in  his  hours  of  leisure,  had  never  time  to  make 
any  great  progress— never  quite  learnt  to  write,  for  example.* 

1  Einhard,  Vita,  15  (P.  ii.  451).  'The  sea-coast  towns  he  left  to  the 
Emperor  of  Constantinople.' 

2  Anon.  (Astron.),  Vita  HI.  Jmp.  4,  7,  11,  12,  i9(Pertz,  ii.  609,  Sec). 

3  Leon  Gautier,  Epopee  Francaise,  vol.  iv.  This  volume  is  entirely 
taken  up  with  the  '  Gestes '  relating  to  Guillaume  Fierebras  and  his 
family. 

4  Einhard,  o.c.  25  (P.  ii.  457)  ;  if.  Mullinger,  Schools  of  Charles  the  Gt., 
beg. 


216  THE  CONQUESTS  OF  CHRISTIANITY. 

Lewis  was  not  the  less  a  good  German.  He  healed  when 
the  opportunity  came  the  wounds  of  Saxony  left  so  bleeding 
by  Charles ; z  so  that  a  contemporary  chronicler  tells  us  that 
in  his  quarrels  with  his  sons,  in  all  the  sad  troubles  which 
clouded  his  latter  years,  the  emperor  trusted  more  to  his 
Saxons  and  to  his  other  German  subjects  than  to  the  Franks.2 

But  in  far  more  important  ways  the  Emperor  Lewis  worked 
to  bring  unity  into  the  political  and  religious  life  of  the  com- 
monwealth over  which  he  ruled.  He  drew  closer — too  close, 
perhaps — that  union  of  the  State  and  the  Church  which  it  was 
the  business  of  the  Carling  House  to  establish,  and  which  was 
at  last  visibly  symbolized  in  the  foundation  of  the  Holy 
Roman  Empire.  Lewis  embodied  in  his  own  person  the 
ideas  of  '  holiness  '  and  of  '  empire.'  He  was  the  first  Royal 
Saint,  the  first  of  an  order  of  which  there  were  many  examples 
in  the  ages  immediately  succeeding  him.  Before  Lewis's 
day  the  '  saints '  upon  the  throne  had  been  of  the  type  of 
St.  Gontran3  of  Burgundy — good,  easy  men,  who  loved  wine 
and  women  and  left  their  people  alone.  There  had  been 
saints  in  the  Carlovingian  House  and  connected  with  it — St. 
Arnold  of  Metz,  St.  Pippin  of  Landen — none  of  whom  had 
worn  the  crown.  Then  there  was  Carloman,  Pippin  the 
Short's  elder  brother ;  he  had  had  a  '  call '  ;  but  had  there 
upon  resigned  his  crown  after  reigning  only  one  year. 
Charlemagne  himself  was  afterwards  reckoned  a  saint,  but 
could  scarcely  have  been  so  in  his  lifetime,  save  of  the 
Gontran  type.  Lewis  was  of  a  very  different  pattern  from 
these ;  and  the  type  which  he  instituted  was  reproduced  in 
later  days  by  many  other  kings — by  Robert  II.  of  the  Cepetan 
line,4  by  the  Emperor  Henry  the  Lame  in  Germany,  by  our 
Edward    the   Confessor   in   a   certain   degree.      Alfred    still 

1  Thegan,  o.c.  14.  2  Anon.  o.c.  45  (P.  ii.  633). 

3  Guntchramnus-      4  Author  of  a  fine  Latin  hymn,  Vent  Sancte  Spiritus, 


CHARACTER  OF  LEWIS.  217 

better  deserves  to  be  included  in  the  list,  which  ends  with 
another  Lewis,  he  who  died  under  the  walls  of  Tunis. 

Lewis  the  Pious  was  the  first  Carlovingian  prince  porphyro- 
genitus.  Charles  was  something  of  the  self-made  man — he 
was  the  self-made  emperor  at  all  events — and  the  spirit  of  his 
ancestors,  rough,  genial  country  gentlemen,  was  strong  in 
him.  Lewis  was  graver,  gentler,  more  self-contained  ;  '  never 
laughed  loud,'  says  Thegan  ;  *  'was  not  choleric'  We  have  the 
emperor's  picture  drawn  for  us  by  this  nobleman  and  priest. 
He  was  '  slow  to  anger,  quick  to  pity ;  immensely  pious ; 
prays  with  tears.'  He  '  trusted  too  much  to  his  counsellors,' 
Thegan  complains,  all  his  time  being  given  to  Psalm-singing 
as  it  were.  These  counsellors  were  chiefly  clerics,  and, 
besides,  of  shamefully  low  extraction — an  offence  in  the  eyes 
of  Thegan.  And  even  in  our  eyes  there  is  some  ground  for 
the  complaint.  The  clerical  class — the  lower  ranks  of  it 
especially — were  still  the  representatives  of  the  Roman-Celtic 
population,  and,  putting  aside  national  fickleness,  it  was 
impossible  for  these  to  be  heartily  friendly  to  such  a  German 
dynasty  as  that  of  Heristal. 

For  the  rest,  Lewis  was  of  middle  height  only2  (a  striking 
contrast  to  his  father),  but  with  long,  slender  legs,  strong 
chest  and  arms,  fine  hands  and  fingers.  'None  came  near  him 
in  throwing  the  javelin  or  drawing  the  bow.  He  had  an 
open  countenance,  lips  neither  too  thick  nor  too  thin,  large 
bright  eyes,  and  a  long  nose ' — of  that  thinness  belike  which 
often  goes  with  the  religious  character.  This  is  Thegan's 
portrait  of  the  Emperor  Lewis. 

Always,    we    may    surmise,    of    a    somewhat    superstitious 
nature,  and   standing   greatly  in  awe  of  celestial 
phenomena,  Lewis,  in  middle  life,  received  a  deep 

1  Thegan,  o.c.  19,  20  (P.  ii.  594). 

9  At  the  time  he  mounted  the  Imperial  throne,  likewise  of  middle  age  (  6 


218  THE  CONQUESTS  OF  CHRISTIANITY. 

impression  from  an  accident  which  nearly  proved  fatal  to  him. 
This  led  to  what,  in  modern  religious  parlance,  would  be 
called  his  'conversion.'  He  was  passing  along  a  wooden 
gallery  attached  to  his  palace  at  Aix,  when  the  building  fell 
about  his  ears,  killing  some  of  his  attendants  and  injuring 
others.  Lewis  himself  was  badly  hurt.  After  that  date  he 
gave  up  the  profane  literature  he  had  delighted  in,  became 
markedly  devout,1  and  at  last,  at  a  critical  time, 
A.D.  819.    ^^   w-th    difficulty  dissuaded   from  laying   down 

his  sceptre  and  taking  the  tonsure.2 

Of  the  many  difficulties  which  encompassed  his  own  throne, 
Charles,  as  it  seemed,  had  left  scarcely  any  to  his  successor. 
The  long  lived  Lombard  quarrel  was  over ;  Aquitaine  was  at 
peace ;  even  the  treacherous  region  of  the  Pyrenees,  which  had 
brought  upon  the  Franks  such  famous  disasters  in  past  times, 
was  tranquil,  at  least  for  a  while.  In  the  parts  of  Europe 
which  most  concern  our  history  an  extraordinary  quiet  had 
succeeded  to  the  long  turmoil.  The  Saxon  war  had  died 
down  in  the  ashes  of  the  Saxon  homesteads ;  but  now  the 
people  were  really  settling  into  peace,  and  new  homesteads, 
new  buildings  of  many  kinds— forts  and  churches — were 
rising  in  their  territory.  The  different  sees — bishoprics  and 
abbeys — which  Charles  had  founded  were  so  many  strong- 
holds of  the  new  reign  of  law  and  order.  Their  musical 
bells  rang  out  over  regions  where  the  sacred  groves  had 
been  desecrated,  where  Goddess  Nerthus  was  no  more  borne 
from  place  to  place  in  her  shrouded  car.  Lewis  added  in 
after-years  to  these  strongholds  of  Christianity.  Hamburg 
claimed  the  wizard  stream  of  the  Elbe,  and  looked  thence 
wistfully  after  Christian  missionaries  who  had  wandered  into 
the  far  north.     To   the  Scandinavian  lands,  with  dreams  of 

«  Einhard,  Ann.  817 ;  Anon.  Vita,  28.  a  Anon,  Vtta,  33. 


DENMARK.  219 

new  spiritual  conquests,  the  thoughts  of  Lewis  turned  ;  while  it 
so  chanced  that  the  internal  condition  of  the  country  was 
especially  favourable  to  his  designs. 

III. 

Godfred,  King  of  Jutland,  had,  as  we  have  seen,  died  by 
the  hands  of  an  assassin  while  he  was  preparing  an  expedition 
for  the  invasion  of  Frankland.  His  nephew  and  successor, 
Hemming,1  sent  to  make  peace  with  the  emperor,  and  with- 
drew   his   army  out  of  reach.2     Two    years   later 

AD    812 

Hemming  died ;  and  his  death  was  the  signal  for 
a  disputed  succession  and  the  outbreak  of  a  civil  war  in 
Denmark,  of  which  the  causes,  the  rights  and  wrongs,  cannot 
now  be  discerned. 3  Such  disputed  successions  were  too 
common  among  the  German  peoples,  with  their  uncertain 
succession  laws,  to  encourage  much  speculation  on  their 
origin.  Be  it  enough  for  us,  as  it  was  enough  for  the 
empire,  that  the  war  for  many  years  crippled  the  strength  of 
the  Danes  and  made  them  impotent  for  evil  outside  their 
own  country.  At  first  on  one  side  stood  Siegfred,  the  nephew 
of  Godfred,*  and  on  the  other  Anulo,  the  grandson  of  a 
certain    Harald,    'formerly   king.' 5     The   two   parties   joined 

1  Or  near  successor.     See  ante  p.  152,  note  x. 
a  Einhard,  Ann.  (P.  i.  199). 

3  In  the  opinion  of  the  present  writer,  at  any  rate,  they  cannot.  Much 
learning,  and  even  more  ingenuity,  has  been  expended  in  enlarging  the 
known  facts  of  Danish  history  at  this  period  by  the  aid  of  mythic 
history  from  the  Sagas  ;  from,  in  the  case  of  this  Godfred,  the  history  of 
the  Ynglinga  Saga  and  the  Ynglinga-tal.  See,  e.g.,  Munch's  Nor  she 
F.  H.  ;  Storm's  Kritiskc  Bidrag  til  Vikinoetidens  Historie,  b.  ii.,  and  in 
Hist.  Tidsk.  iii.  58-79  ;  also  Howorth  in  Tr.  of  R.  Hist.  Soc.  vi.  and  vii. 
But  how  vain  these  speculations  are  is  demonstrated  in  Corp.  P.  B.  i.  242. 
Compare  also  Steenstrup,  Indledning  i  Normt.  68-80. 

4  '  Nepos  Godfridi  regis,'  Einhard.  The  most  natural  supposition  with 
regard  to  Siegfred  is  that  he  was  son  of  the  last  Siegfred  and  nephew  of 
Godfred.     Afterwards  Godfred's  sons  came  into  the  field, 

5  'Nepos  Herioldi  quondam  regis,'  Einl 


220  THE  CONQUESTS  OF  CHRISTIANITY, 

battle  in  a  great  engagement.  The  Frankish  chroniclers  give 
us  fabulous  accounts  of  the  number  of  the  slain.1  Both 
leaders  fell — Siegfred  and  Anulo.  But  the  party  of  the 
latter  was  victorious ;  it  chose  as  successors  to  Hemming 
the  two  brothers  of  Anulo,  Harald  and  Reginfred  ;  and  they 
extended  their  rule,  as  appears,  not  only  over  Denmark 
(Jutland,  the  Isles,  and  Skonen),  but  over  the  Norwegian 
Viken  2  also. 

But  now  the  sons  of  Godfred  appear  upon  the  scene.  They 
had  fled  to  Sweden, 3  whence  they  gathered  forces  enough  to 
drive  out  Harald  and  Reginfred  in  their  turn.  These  two 
first  wandered  eastward  into  the  territory  of  the  Abodriti, 
their  nearest  Slavonic  neighbours — a  territory  that  is  Mecklen- 
burg nowadays.  Thence  they  returned  a  year  later,  tried  their 
fortunes  once  more,  and  were  defeated.     Reginfred  was  slain  4 

»  tn    «-„      and   Harald  as;ain   driven  forth.s     Harald  turned 

A.D.   814.  ° 

this  time  towards  the  Franks,  and  sent  to  pray 
for  the  assistance  of  the  Frank  emperor ;  and  Lewis,  who 
had  just  mounted  the  throne,  embraced  this  occasion 
for    a    '  spirited    foreign    policy ' — rather,    we    may    believe, 

with     an     eye    to     religious     than     to     political 

'   '       '    interests.     Balderic,  Count  Balderic  (of  Friuli),6  a 

highly  distinguished  officer   of  the   empire,   was   told    off  to 

1  10,940,  Einhard  (P.  i.  199).  Another  MS.  reads  10,300.  14,000, 
Adam  of  Bremen  (Pertz,  vii.  290).  2  I.e.,  Westfold. 

3  '  Apud  Suiones,'  Einhard. 

4  The  elder  of  the  two  sons  of  Godfred  was  also  slain  (Einhard  I.e.). 

5  Einhard,  Ann.  (Pertz,  i.  201),  Chron.  Moiss.  ii.  A.D.  813-4  (P.  ii.  259). 
According  to  Adam  of  Bremen,  i.  17  (Pertz,  vii.  291),  Harald  first  drove 
out  his  brother  Reginfred,  'who  became,  a  Viking.'  This  is  the  reason 
why  Jessenand  Storm  have  identified  this  Reginfred  with  Ragner  Lodbrog, 
who  by  Saxo  Grammaticus  is  also  made  an  opponent  of  Harald  the 
Baptized.  But  this  Reginfred  was  certainly  slain  not  later  than  814. 
The  Chron.  Moiss.  elsewhere  speaks  of  Reginfred  being  slain  by  the  Abo- 
driti in  A.D.  808  (Pertz,  i.  308) ;  so  that  his  history  is  very  obscure. 

6  Einhard,  Ann.  (P.  i.  202) ;  Anon-  V,  HI  (P,  ii.  620). 


HARALD  THE  DANE.  221 

assist    Harald.      In    810  Harald   was  for  a  while 

AD    819 

restored,   or  at   least  admitted  to  a  share  of  the 
kingdom.1 

This  was  an  opportunity  for  edging  in  some  Christian  teach- 
ing along  with  military  aid.  Two  men  beside  Lewis  had  this 
aim  at  heart ;  men  highly  distinguished  in  the  politics  of  those 
days,  trusted  councillors  of  Lewis  as  yet — afterwards  the  main- 
stay of  his  opponents — one  was  Ebbo,  Bishop  of  Rheims,  the 
other  Wala,  Abbot  of  Corvey.  The  biographers  of  Lewis, 
Thegan  more  especially,  and  most  of  the  chroniclers  have 
nothing  but  ill  to  say  of  the  former.  He  was  of  low  origin, 
had  been  raised  to  his  position  under  favour  of  Lewis,  who 
was  his  foster-brother,  and  repaid  this  favour  by  the  basest  in- 
gratitude. That  is  their  account.  However  this  may  be, 
Ebbo   threw   himself  into    the    missionary    work 

A~D.  823. 

among  the  Danes  with  zeal ;  and  it  was  a  work 
which  a  wise  policy,  as  well  as  the  interests  of  religion,  would 
dictate.  Ebbo,  with  Halitgar,  Bishop  of  Cambray,  wrere  sent 
in  823  as  missionaries  to  Denmark.  Under  the  royal  and  the 
papal  sanction  they  preached  to  the  people  of  South  Denmark, 
intoned  their  masses,  lighted  their  candles,  marched  in  their 
processions — no  man  hindering  them.2  Many  of  the  Danes,  it 
is  said,  were  converted  at  this  time.  Schleswick  (Sliesthorp), 
the  capital  of  this  part  of  Denmark,  was  certainly  brought  once 
more  into  close  relationship  with  the  empire,  and  made  greater 
strides  than  ever  before  towards  becoming  a  trading  station  of 
some  importance,  a  sort  of  intermediary  between  Dorstad  and 
the  Baltic  countries. 

But  the  old  quarrel  between  Heathendom  and     .  _ 

A.D.  826. 

Christendom  was  not  to  be  composed  after  this 

1  Einhard  (P.  i.  206). 

a  Einhard,  Ann.  (P.  i.  211)  ;  see  letter  of  Paschal  I.  {Regest.  Pont.; 
Dip.  Dan.  p.  1).     It  is  not  dated. 


222  THE  CONQUESTS  OF  CHRISTIANITY. 

easy  fashion,  by  the  peaceful  conversion  of  the  Scandinavian 
folk.  We  may  guess  that  Harald's  leaning  for  support  upon 
the  hateful  power  of  the  Caesar  did  not  stand  him  in  good  stead 
among  his  countrymen.  After  he  had  reigned  seven  years, 
subsequent  to  his  restoration,  the  civil  war  broke  out  again. 
The  sons  of  Godfred  were  now  represented  by  one,  Horik.1 
He  had  lived  for  some  years  in  banishment  in  southern 
Norway.  Now  he  returned  to  Denmark,  and  drove  out 
Harald  once  again,  as  it  proved,  finally.  The  deposed  king 
turned  straightway  to  the  Emperor  of  the  West,  and — a  sure 
way  of  gaining  the  armed  support  of  Lewis,  if  he  had  no  other 
reason — he  declared  himself  converted  by  the  preaching  of  the 
missionaries.  He  was  ready  to  accept  baptism  He  and  his 
following  took  ship  to  sail  up  the  Rhine.  Lewis  was  in  his 
palace  of  Ingelheim,  close  to  Mainz,2  when  the  square  white 
sails  of  the  Danes  came  doubling  up  the  reaches  of  the  river. 
Harald  had  with  him  his  wife  and  his  son,  Godfred  by  name, 
and  a  good  company  of  Danish  followers.  They  may  have 
looked  out  with  many  feelings,  not  always  of  the  religious  kind, 
upon  the  fair  country  through  which  they  passed ;  upon  the 
villas  and  churches  which  mirrored  themselves  in  the  river  ; 
most  of  all,  perhaps,  they  appreciated  the  rich  vine-lands  which 
lay  about  Ingelheim.  Godfred  more  especially,  we  may  surmise, 
took  in  these  sights  and  laid  them  to  heart. 

Harald  was  ready  both  to  receive  baptism  and  to  place  him- 
self in  the  hands  of  the  emperor.  The  spiritual  victory,  we 
may  be  sure,  was  the  dearest  in  Lewis's  eyes.  It  was  at  Mainz 
that  the  ceremony  of  Harald's  baptism  took  place ;  and  Boni- 


1  I.e.,  Harekr,  not  Eirekr  (Eric),  as  former  historians,  and  as  Howorth 
still  in  Tr.  R.  H.  S.,  vol.  vi.     See  Storm,  Kr.  Bidrag,  &c,  p.  41,  note. 
2  Einhard. 

Engilin — ipse  pius  placito  tunc  tramite — heim 

Advolat  ...(!)  Ermoldus  Nigellus,  Car>nina,\v.  179. 


BAPTISM  OF  HARALD.  223 

face's  ancient  see  was  the  right  one  to  be  the  witness  of  these 
first  conversions  from  Scandinavian  lands.1 

Our  court  poet,  or  would-be  court  poet,  Ermoldus  Nigellus2 
can  hardly  contain  himself  with  rapture  at  the  spectacle. 
Harald,  his  wife,  and  his  son  Godfred,  were  first  baptized. 
Lewis  drew  the  king  out  of  the  water ;  Judith,  the  empress,  did 
the  same  office  for  Harald's  wife  ;  while  Lothair,  the  imperial 
prince,  or  rather  co- Augustus  with  his  father,  drew  out  the 
young  Godfred — Godfred  who  was  to  be  heard  of  in  after-days 
in  a  very  different  capacity  from  that  of  the  white-robed  cate- 
chumen. Then  all  the  Danish  following  of  Harald  imitated 
the  example  of  their  lord.  Conversions  were  wholesale  in 
those  days.  Nor,  except  as  it  might  be  a  mark  of  submission, 
or  unless  some  dreaded  it  as  a  form  of  magic,  had  the  Danes 
any  intense  objection  to  this  kind  of  conformity.  Frank 
nobles,  or  clerics  of  a  sceptical  turn,  had  their  own  private 
opinions  and  their  own  stories  touching  these  conversions  of 
the  heathen  ;  such  as  that  story  which  we  have  already  quoted 
from  the  monk  of  St.  Gallen. 

That  was  not  the  spirit  in  which  these  victories  of  the 
Church  were  regarded  by  the  emperor  himself;  and  Ermoldus 
Nigellus,  the  vates  sacer  of  such  kind  as  was  obtainable  in  those 
days,  has  enough  to  say  upon  the  glory  of  the  occasion  : — 

O  Hludowice,  Deo  quantas  das,  magne,  catervas  1 

Quantus  odor  Christo  te  faciente  meat ! 
Haec  tibi  lucra  diu,  princeps,  servata  manebuntj 

Abstrahis  ore  lupi,  qua?  facis  esse  Dei. 

Caesar  ut  ecclesiam  gressu  pervenit  honesto, 

Exposcit  votis  more  suo  Dominum. 
Mox  tuba  Theutonis  clare  dat  rite  boatum, 

Quam  sequitur  clerus  protinus  atque  chori. 


*  Einh. ;  Thegan,  0.  c.  33  (P.  ii.  597).  2  Carmina,  iv.  283 — end. 


224  THE  CONQUESTS  OF  CHRISTIANITY. 

Miratur  Heriold,  conjunx  miranlur  et  omnes 

Proles,  et  socii  culmina  tanta  Dei, 
Mirantur  clerum,  mirantur  denique  templum, 

Atque  sacerdotes  orhciumque  pium. 

Versification  such  as  this  is  poor  indeed.  And,  if  we  had 
nothing  else  to  judge  by,  we  should  think  meanly  of  the 
Roman  element  in  mediaeval  history.  But  we  must  not  judge 
by  this.  Can  we  ever  rightly  judge  of  the  Romans  by  their 
verse,  even  at  its  best  days  ?  In  the  Latin  prose  of  this  time 
there  still  lingers  a  far-off  echo  of  the  old  majesty  of  Rome — in 
the  Latin  prose  as  we  read  it  in  the  letters  and  allocutions  of 
the  great  ecclesiastics  of  the  age ;  best  of  all  in  the  briefs  or 
bulls  of  the  successor  of  St.  Peter,  when  we  hear  him  chastising 
or  threatening  some  sinner  in  high  places  : — 

c.  .  .  sancimus  atque  discernimus,  ut  post  secundam  vel  tertiam 
admonitionem  sanctitatis  tuae,  quisquis  res  prsefatae  ecclesiae, 
quibus  tu  aliquando  ad  usum  vel  sustentationem  illic  servientium 
vel  tibi  obsequentium  fruitus  fuisse  dignosceris,  retinere,  et  sibi 
ulterius  absque  voto  tuo  vindicare  tentaverit  .  .  .  tanquam 
sacrilegus,  ab  Ecclesiae  gremio  atque  sacro  corpore  et  pretioso 
domini  nostri  Jesu  Christi  sanguine,  donee  praesenti  decreto 
nostro  acquieverit,  habeatur  omnibus  modis  alienus,  et  tanquam 
violentus  invasor  atque  tyrannus  sit  Christianorum  communione 
privatus  ;  ita  ut  qui  hujusmodi  in  communione  susceperit,  simili 
pcena  teneatur  astrictus/ x 

There  is  something,  I  say,  not  unmajestic  in  the  ponderous 
length  of  these  sentences.  In  reading  such  there  rises  up  be- 
fore us,  better  than  in  any  other  way,  the  vision  of  the  awful 
holder  of  the  keys,  the  servus  servorum  pronouncing  judgment 
from  his  curule  chair. 

1  Migne,  119,  col.  910.  This  is  a  bull  directed  by  Pope  Nicholas  I. 
against  Hincmar.     See  Chapter  XVI. 


THE   WEAPONS  OF  CHRISTIANITY.  225 

Then  beside  the  Latin  prose  of  this  age  there  was  a  new 
form  of  Latin  verse  rising  up,  of  a  kind  unknown  to  the 
ancients,  where  lines  were  measured  by  beats  and  not  by  feet : — 

O,  tu  qui  servas  armis  ista  moenia 
Noli  dormire,  moneo,  sed  vigila. 
Dum  Hector  vigil  extitit  in  Troia, 
Non  earn  cepit  frandulenta  Graecia. 

•  •  •  ■ 

Or  such  as  this  : — 

Noxque  ilia,  nox  amara,  noxque  dura  nimium  ; 
In  qua  fortes  ceciderun',  prselio  doctissimi, 
Pater,  mater,  soror,  frater,  quos  amici  fleverant. 

It  is  in  verse  of  this  kind,  unspeakably  wild  and  lonely  as  it 
sounds  at  first,  growing  more  and  more  solemn  as  the  ages 
advance  and  as  to  the  music  of  this  measured  beat  is  added 
the  new  charm  of  rhyme,  tint  speaks  most  clearly  the  appeal- 
ing voice  of  mediaeval  Catholicism  : — 

Quid  sum  miser  turn  dicturus  ? 
Quern  patronem  rogaturus? 
Cum  vix  Justus  sit  securus. 

It  was  in  this  wise  that  the  soul  of  Ancient  Rome  still  in- 
formed the  body  of  the  New  Empire.  And  it  was  by  weapons 
drawn  from  the  same  armoury  that  Christianity  waged  its  wars 
against  the  heathens  of  the  North. 

Merely  to  recall  the  labours  of  missionaries  as  they  are 
related  to  us  is  nothing:  so  many  baptized  on  this  occasion, 
a  church  built  in  that  newly  conquered  territory,  a  journey 
made  to  that  far  country  with  doubtful  results.  We  need  to 
try  and  picture  for  ourselves  the  weapons  by  which  this  spiritual 
warfare  was  carried  on.  And  in  doing  this  we  must  not  think 
first  of  all  either  of  Pauline  eloquences,  or  of  Luther- Eckius 
controversies  ;  but  rather  of  much  subtler  appeals  to  fancy  and 
imagination — of   music   and   singing,    of  church   organs   and 

16 


226  THE  CONQUESTS  OF  CHRISTIANITY. 

church  bells  ;  these  made  the  effective  '  in-sounding  '  (icarhxn<"Q) 
to  the  barbarian  ear ;  and  of  rites  new  and  strange,  terrifying 
and  fascinating,  of  incantations  and  of  believed  dooms. 

We  must  picture  white-robed  processions  of  priests  and 
acolytes,  chanting,  carrying  lighted  tapers  (a  sight  to  my  mind 
always  wonderfully  impressive,  and  most  so  by  daylight7),  on 
far-off  shores,  in  wild  and  woody  places.  With  varying  success 
and  failure  these  weapons  were  being,  or  were  to  be,  employed 
against  the  heathen  on  every  soil  of  Northern  Europe ;  upon 
grounds  where  the  Vikings  sought  out  the  Christians  to 
destroy  them,  and  in  territories  where  ventured  the  Christian 
missionaries. 

On  us  the  spell  of  mediaeval  Catholicism  descends  most 
directly  from  three  things :  from  the  Gothic  architecture, 
from  church  music  and  from  church  bells.  The  first  had 
not  yet  sprung  into  existence.  There  was  nothing  specially 
solemn  about  the  basilica  churches  which  at  this  date  gave 
the  pattern  of  church  architecture.  Their  transformation  into 
the  gloomy  and  impressive  Romanesque  did  not  begin  before 
the  end  of  our  Viking  Age.  It  was  reserved  for  the  descendants 
of  the  Vikings  themselves  to  give  to  the  Romanesque  building 
its  grandest  form.  Church  bells  of  the  larger  sort  were  now  in 
general  use.  The  Columban  monks  had  not  enjoyed  their  in- 
spiration. We  know  from  numerous  finds  what  sort  of  bells 
their  monasteries  possessed — little  square  ones,  no  bigger  than, 
and  much  the  same  shape  as,  those  which  cattle  wear  abroad, 
in  Switzerland  more  especially.  One  might  fancy  a  St.  Gallus 
carrying  this  type  of  bell  with  him  to  his  Helvetian  retreats, 
and  the  type  having  descended  in  our  days  to  the  use  of 
cattle.     I  know  not  whether  this  really   has  been   the  case. 

1  Impressive,  too,  I  guess,  in  no  common  degree  to  our  own  forefathers  ; 
witness  their  beautiful  imagery  for  the  sun,  '  the  world's  candle  ' — woruld- 
condel(Beoivulf) — 'God's  bright  candle.'    Codes  condel  heorht  (Bmnanbnrg). 


THE  WEAPONS  OF  CHRISTIANITY.  227 

Now  from  the  South  (originating  with  Paulinus,  Bishop  of  Nola, 
as  is  generally  said)  a  much  finer  type  of  bell  had  been  in- 
troduced into  the  churches.  In  Bede's  day  many  of  the 
English  churches  and  monasteries,  including  Bede's  own 
monastery  at  Wearmouth,  possessed  bells  of  this  new  type — 
larger,  much  more  sonorous  and  affecting,  than  any  before 
known.  Mediaeval  legend  is  full  of  stories  of  the  magic  effect 
of  church  bells  in  driving  away  the  spirits  of  evil.  We  often 
see  representations  of  Satan  imprisoned  under  a  bell. 

Church  music,  too,  had  made  notable  advances  in  recent 
years.  The  first  organ  was  brought  to  Charlemagne  from  the 
East.  Two  artificers  came  from  the  Byzantine  Court  bringing 
their  new-made  instrument.  It  is  to  the  present — ninth — century, 
and  to  the  reign  (I  think)  of  Lewis  the  Pious,  that  belongs  the 
story  of  a  woman  who  entered  the  cathedral  of  Metz  and  there 
heard  an  organ  for  the  first  time.  She  was  so  overcome  by 
emotion  that  she  fell  down  dead.  And  with  the  use  of  new 
instruments  of  music  continued  improvements  in  the  arts  of 
singing  had  gone  forward.  Gregory  I.  has  been  reckoned  the 
inaugurator  of  this  improved  church  singing,  though  it  is  not 
to  be  believed  that  any  of  the  music  now  called  Gregorian 
really  comes  from  him.  We  have  no  musical  notation  as  old 
as  the  days  of  Gregory  the  Great.  The  new  music  spread  on 
all  sides.  Beda  tells  us  how  diligently  it  was  taught  in  Eng- 
land before  his  day  by  John  the  Archchanter,1  whom  Benedict 
Biscop  brought  over  to  instruct  the  monks  of  Wearmouth. 

1  John,  the  Archchanter  of  St.  Peter's,  and  Abbot  of  St.  Martin's  of 
Tours  (see  Beda,  H.  E.  iv.  18).  It  is  known  that  some  works  on  music  have 
been  ascribed  to  Beda,  but  probably  without  foundation. 

The  curious  story  in  the  Monk  of  St.  Gallen  of  the  efforts  made  by 
Charlemagne  to  improve  the  singing  in  his  dominions,  and  the  desire  of  the 
Italian  instructors  to  defeat  his  object  and  prevent  the  barbarians,  north  of 
the  Alps,  from  rivalling  the  singing  in  Italian  churches,  is  likewise  character- 
istic. Gesta  K.  M.  i.  10  (Pertz,  ii.  735).  See  also  Anonymi,  Vita  HluJ. 
Imp.,  19  (P.  ii.  606). 


228  THE  CONQUESTS  OF  CHRISTIANITY. 

IV. 

When  Harald  returned  it  was  thought  wise  that  some  new 
missionary  should  accompany  the  Danes  back  to  Denmark. 
Wala  cast  his  keen  eyes  upon  a  young  monk  (he  was  only  twenty- 
five),  late  of  his  own  abbey,  Corbie,  now  of  New  Corvey,  in 
Saxony,  the  daughter  monastery  of  his  own.  The  name  of  the 
monk  was  Anscar  (Oscar),  one  of  those  blameless  lives  which 
grow  up  sporadically  in  Mediaeval  History,  which  come  in  con- 
tact with,  and  yet  scarcely  seem  to  touch,  the  political  life 
which  surrounds  them.  He  was  a  Saxon ;  so  near  a  neighbour 
to  the  Scandinavian  people  that  he  might  well  enter  into  their 
thoughts  and  understand  their  questionings  of  nature.  It  is 
fitting  that  we  find  him,  from  boyhood  upward,  much  occu- 
pied with  speculations  upon  death,  often  seeing  visions  from  the 
world  of  spirits.  When  he  was  quite  a  child  his  mother  died, 
and  soon  after  he  saw  a  vision  of  her  walking  in  the  choir  of 
the  Virgin  along  a  lovely  path.  He  himself  was  on  a  miry, 
slippery  road,  and  could  not  get  from  it  to  where  the  procession 
moved.  But  the  Virgin  came  to  him  and  admonished  him 
that  if  he  desired  to  come  to  their  company  he  must  put  aside 
all  idleness  and  frivolity.  Anscar  obeyed  the  call ;  in  his 
fourteenth  year  he  adopted  the  monastic  habit.  The  death  of 
Charles  the  Great,  which  happened  at  this  time,  was  another 
event  which  deeply  moved  him.  Once  Anscar  himself  had 
beheld  this  mighty  emperor;  now  was  imperial  Caesar  turned 
to  clay — and  his  soul? — one  could  not  be  sure.1  Anscar  saw 
another  vision  directly  afterwards.  Peter  and  John  the  Baptist 
came  to  him,  took  his  soul  out  of  his  body  and  carried  him 
with  them  to  purgatory.     Thence  to  the  height  of  heaven,  out 

1  Charles  was  at  any  rate,  according  to  the  vision  of  the  Monk  Wetlinus 
of  Reichenau,  severely  punished  in  purgatory  for  his  carnal  sins  (see 
Walafrid  Strabo's  poem  in  Migne,  t.  114). 


MISSION  OF  ANSCAR.  229 

of  which  a  voice  sounded  in  his  ears,  c  Go  hence,  thou  shalt 
return  to  me  adorned  with  the  crown  of  martyrdom  ! '  Martyr- 
dom, in  fact  (or  at  any  rate  in  the  ordinary  sense),  he  never 
did  attain.  '  But,'  says  his  biographer,  '  I  deem  that  by  the 
many  pains  and  dangers  which  he  suffered  in  his  life  the  same 
reward  was  earned.'1  The  vision  gave  him  an  'unappeasable 
thirst'  after  heavenly  things.  Some  years  later,  in  another 
vision,  he  was  warned  that  he  was  especially  chosen  as  an 
apostle  to  the  heathen. 

Anscar,  accompanied  by  a  younger  volunteer  from  Wala's 
household  called  Autbert,  joined  Harald  and  his  following  on 
their  return  journey  to  Denmark.  They  began  by  setting  up  a 
school  in  the  country,  at  Schleswick ;  and  Anscar  was  especially 
eager  in  looking  out  for  Danish  boy  slaves  whom  he  could 
purchase  from  the  Christian  merchants  —  of  Dorstad  or 
wherever  it  might  be — and  whom  he  could  instruct  in  the 
principles  of  Christianity  and  train  for  the  work  of  preaching 
to  their  countrymen.  One  of  the  converts  obtained  in  this 
manner  was  Rimbert,  who  afterwards  succeeded  to  the  labours 
and  to  the  honours  of  Anscar,  and  who  wrote  his  life. 

How  hopeful  at  this  time  all  things  looked  for  the  quiet  incor- 
poration of  the  Scandinavian  nations  into  the  bodyof  .  _ 

A.D.  circ  830 
Christendom — at  all  events  if  one  did  but  turn  one's 

eyes  away  from  what  was  going  on  in  a  far  western  island.  How 
different  from  the  days  when  Godfred  was  hurling  his  fleet  upon 
the  shore  of  Frisia.  England  itself  was  left  at  peace  just  now ;  was 
not  again  troubled  till  834.  And  now  envoys  came  to  Lewis 
from  one  of  the  kings  of  Sweden  who  seemed  likewise  to  be 
showing  the  most  hopeful  *  dispositions '  towards  Christianity, 
and  it  was  determined  to  send  an  expedition  even  to  those  far 
regions.2     The  king,  from  whom  the  ambassadors  came,  lived 

\   Vita  Anscari,  c.  3.  2  Ibid.  c.  9. 


230  THE  CONQUESTS  OF  CHRISTIANITY. 

not  in  the  parts  of  Sweden  bordering  on  the  Danish  kingdom, 
but  far  round  in  the  Lake  Malar  country.  His  capital  was 
Sigtuna,  upon  the  Upsala  fjord.  Near  it  stood  the  most  sacred 
spot  in  all  Denmark  in  the  days  of  heathenism,  Upsala  of  the 
three  great  mounds  (of  Odin,  Thor,  and  Frey),  and  of  the  sacred 
grove  of  which,  and  of  Adam  of  Bremen's  description  of  it, 
mention  was  made  in  a  former  chapter. 

This  kingdom  of  Sigtuna  in  the  country  of  Suithiod  was  the 
germ  of  the  later  kingdom  of  Sweden.  The  fact  that  we  find 
at  this  day  the  capital  of  Sweden  upon  Lake  Malar  instead  of, 
say,  at  Gotenborg,  near  to  Denmark  and  to  Norway,  is  due  to  the 
ultimate  pre-eminence  of  the  Suithiod  kingdom.  Near  Sig- 
tuna itself  stood  a  town  which  at  that  time  seems  to  have  been 
a  great  market — perhaps  among  different  nationalities  of  the 
Eastern  Baltic  x  :  its  name  was  Birca.  It  is  represented  by  the 
modern  Bjorko,  an  island  on  Lake  Malar,  which  the  traveller 
up  the  lake  reaches  just  after  passing  the  mouth  of  the  Grips- 
holmsvik. 

The  earliest  coins  ever  made  in  Scandinavia  come,  so  it 
happens,  from  the  site  of  this  Birca ;  and  they  are  imitations  of 
the  money  of  Dorstad,  belonging  to  the  first  half  of  the  ninth 
century.2  So  we  may  believe  that  there  had  been  already  some 
communication  between  Birca  and  Dorstad.  The  Life  of 
Anscar  simply  tells  us  that  (in  829)  an  embassy  came  to  Lewis 
from  the  king  of  Sweden  saying  that  many  of  his  people  had  a 
leaning  towards  Christianity,  and  praying  that  fit  persons  should 
be  sent  to  preach  to  them.  Anscar  was  at  once  chosen.  He 
left  his  work  among  the  Danes — no  longer  a  work  in  Denmark, 

1  By  way  of  Gothland  to  the  mouths  of  the  Vistula  or  the  Dwina,  and 
hence  by  the  Dnieper  to  the  Black  Sea  and  to  Greece  (cf.  Montelius, 
op.  cit.). 

a  See  H.  Hildebrand's  Nordens  Aldsta  Mynt,  in  Journal  of  R.  Hist. 
Soc.  of  Stockholm,  1887,  an(l  tne  present  writer's  remarks  on  the  same  in 
the  Numismatic  Chronicle,  same  year. 


HARALD  DETHRONED.  231 

unhappily — and  betook  himself,  in  company  with  a  certain 
brother  Witmar,  to  a  perilous  journey  upon  untraversed  seas. 
On  their  way  to  Sigtuna,  in  the  train  of  the  returning  Swedish 
envoy,  they  were  attacked  by  pirates  (so  piracy,  we  see,  was  not 
reserved  altogether  for  the  Christians),  and  the  ship's  company 
only  saved  themselves  by  abandoning  their  vessel  and  escaping 
to  the  shore.  Anscar  lost  all  his  books,  all  the  gifts  to  the 
Swedish  king  with  which  Lewis  had  charged  hirn. 

They  had  to  travel  by  land  in  a  forlorn  condition  till  they 
reached  Birca.  Not  the  less  were  they  well  received  by  the 
king,  Bjorn,  and  were  allowed  to  build  a  church  upon  the 
island.  In  1834  was  celebrated  the  millenary  of  the  building 
of  this,  the  first  Christian  church  in  Sweden.  For  some  years 
Christianity  kept  its  little  candle  burning  in  this  far  land 
Bishop  Gauzbert  succeeded  Bishop  Anscar.  But  while  he  held 
the  See,  there  was  a  sudden  revolt  of  the  Swedes  against  this 
new  apparition  of  a  foreign  creed  in  their  midst.  In  the  tumult 
Nithard,  the  nephew  of  Gauzbert,  was  killed,  and  Gauzbert 
himself  was  driven  forth,  and  for  about  seven  years  Sweden 
remained  without  a  missionary,  until  the  work  was  taken  up 
once  more  by  Anscar.  For  the  present  this  was  the  limit  of 
Lewis's  success  in  spreading  Christianity  in  the  north. 

Harald,  moreover,  as  it  turned  out,  did  not  gain  much  by 
the  protection  of  the  great  emperor.  Lewis  could  not  main- 
tain him  on  the  throne.  And  eventually  the  feudality  of  the 
Dane  had  to  be  maintained,  not  by  any  part  of  Denmark 
becoming  a  fief  of  the  empire,  but  by  the  carving  out  from  that 
empire  of  a  fief  for  the  dethroned  Harald.  He  received  the 
county  of  Rustringia  between  the  German  Ocean,  the  Weser, 
and  the  Ems.  It  was  almost  the  equivalent  of  the  more 
modern  Duchy  of  Oldenburg.  And  in  addition  he  got  what 
was  of  perhaps  still  greater  value,  the  rich  trading  town  of 
Dors  ad.       We  have    already  seen    how    the    Low    Countries 


232  THE  CONQUESTS  OF  CHRISTIANITY. 

were  even  now  laying  the  foundation  of  that  commercial  and 
industrial  greatness  which  distinguished  them  throughout  the 
Middle  Ages.  Their  woven  stuffs  were  the  best  in  the  empire 
north  of  the  Alps.1  If  these  fabrics  were  '  worth  a  mass,'  or  a 
baptism,  Dorstat,  the  rich  emporium  of  all,  was  a  whetting  bait 
to  the  cupidity  of  the  Vikings. 

By  yielding  up  these  provinces  to  Harald  and  his  kin,  Chris- 
tians became,  for  the  first  time,  the  subjects  of  the  heathens,  as 
a  chronicler  declares  a  few  years  later.  And  in  truth  Harald's 
fief  became  a  very  hotbed  of  Viking  troubles  in  after-years.  His 
next  successor — his  brother  or  his  nephew  Rorik— got  the  name 
of  fel  Christianitatis,  the  gall  of  Christendom.2  And  his  son 
Godfred — whom  we  beheld  just  now  drawn  out  of  the  water  by 
Lothair,  the  son  of  Lewis — what  he  became  in  after-years,  how 
he  observed  his  baptismal  vows  (if  he  made  any),  we  shall 
partly  see  hereafter. 

In  truth  it  must  be  sorrowfully  owned  that  the  history  of  this 
conversion  of  Harald  and  his  Danes,  the  joy  which  was  ex- 
pended over  it  at  the  time,  contrasted  with  what  it  really 
meant  and  what  it  led  to,  are  abundantly  suggestive,  and 
typical  of  much  in  the  history  of  the  Emperor  Lewis. 

During  these  days  of  early  success  in  the  empire,  of  Lewis's  pros- 
perity advancing  on  many  different  sides  by  leaps  and  bound*, 
Christianity  stretching  its  wings  for  new  flights  to  the  far  north, 
what,  we  are  tempted  to  ask,  had  been  done  in  the  way  of  carry- 
ing out  those  soberer  plans  with  which  Charles  had  been  engaged 
during  almost  his  last  moments;  what  especially  in  the  direction 
of  building  navies,  arming  for  the  coast  defence  ?  Now,  if  men 
knew  it,  is  the  golden  time,  not  likely  to  come  again  whether 
used  or  neglected.     Look  far  away  to  the  islands  of  the  west — 

1  See  e.g. ,  the  Monk  of  St.  Gall,  i.  26. 

a  Cf.  Ann.  Fnld.  850,  and  Prudent.  (P.  i.  445). 


DECLINING  SUN  OF  LEWIS.  233 

if  amid  these  Nigellus  rhapsodies  men  had  time  to  cast  a  glance 
that  way — and  they  would  see  Viking  fleets  taking  stations  all 
over  the  Shetlands  and  the  Orkneys,  on  the  northern  mainland  of 
Scotland,  on  the  Western  Islands,  which  they  call  the  Sudreyer, 
or  South  Islands.  They  would  see  in  Ireland  such  a  plunder- 
ing of  monasteries  and  slaughter  of  monks  as  in  the  days  of 
Charlemagne  and  Alcuin  would  have  set  Europe  astir — 
plunderings  in  Wicklow,  Dublin,  Meath,  Louth,  Down — on  all 
the  islands  round  the  Irish  coast. 

Nay,  but  there  had  already  been  some  sign  of  danger  nearer 
home,  though  it  must  be  said  that  the  one  raid  of  this  period  was 
victoriously  driven  off.  In  820  a  fleet  stood  in  to  the 
Flanders  coast,  just  succeeded  in  landing,  and  burnt 
a  few  huts.  After  that  it  made  for  the  mouth  of  the  Seine,  but 
without  being  able  to  effect  a  landing.  Finally  the  Viking 
fleet  sailed  round  the  rocky  Breton  coast  to  Aquitaine,  and 
accomplished  more  there  (in  that  anarchical  country).  It  burned 
a  small  town,  Bouin,  a  little  south  of  the  Loire  mouth.1  As  a 
plundering  expedition  this  one  was  nothing ;  as  an  exploring 
one  it  was  important.  There  may  once  before  have  been  a 
northern  fleet  round  the  Cape  of  Finisterre,2  or  this  may  have 
been  the  Jirst  Viking  fleet  in  the  Bay  of  Biscay.  Certainly  the 
way  in  which  this  fleet  was  beaten  off  from  one  place  after 
another  speaks  well  for  the  coast  defences  at  this  time— six 
years  only  after  the  death  of  Charlemagne.  It  was  fifteen  years 
after  this  attack  before  the  Vikings  made  another  one  upon  the 
coast  of  France. 

And  now  the  sun  of  Lewis  the  Emperor,  which  had  touched 
its  meridian,  began  to  take  a  westering  course  and  to  diminish 
its  altitude  day  by  day  until  it  sank  amid  sad  contagious  clouds 
to  its  setting.     The  catastrophes  which  now  overtook  Western 

1  Anon.  Vita  HI.  Imp.  c.  23  (Pertz,  vol.  ii.  625). 

2  See  above,  p.  150. 


234  THE  CONQUESTS  OF  CHRISTIANITY. 

Christendom,  the  gradual  dissolution  of  the  Carlovingian 
Empire,  constituted  one  of  the  most  potent  factors  in  the 
future  successes  of  the  Vikings. 


CHAPTER   VIII. 
CIVIL   WAR, 


The  date  of  Harald's  baptism  may  be  looked  upon  as  the 
apogee  of  the  reign  of  Lewis,  nay  even  as  the  highest  ascen- 
dant of  the  fortunes  of  the  Carling  house.  We  seem  to  stand 
midway  between  the  irruption  of  the  wild  Franks  and  the 
overthrow  by  them  ot  the  Roman  rule  in  Gaul,  and  the  true 
mediaeval  era  of  European  history,  when  a  theocratic  Republic 
more  complex  but,  in  its  fashion,  not  less  great  than  the  old 
Roman  Empire,  occupied  its  room. 

Times  were  changed  since  an  earlier  Lewis,  whom  we  call 
Clovis,  had  laid  the  foundation  of  the  Frankish  monarchy,  by 
breaking  the  skull  of  a  too  independent  opposition  leader  of 
his  day.  Such  rough-and-ready  methods  of  government  would 
have  ill-suited  the  mild,  grave  emperor,  who  now,  clad  in  his 
golden  robes,  presided  every  year  over  the  General  Assembly, 
the  Placitum,  the  Campus  Maiae.  Yet  not  less  but  much  more 
of  outward  majesty  surrounded  the  person  of  this  monarch. 
Each  one  in  the  assembly  of  grandees  (the  elite  of  the  people l) 
had  to  ask  leave  before  he  made  a  speech,  and  he  kissed  the 

1  *  Electi populi?  Ermoldus  Nigellus. 


236  CIVIL  WAR. 

foot  of  the  king  ere  he  began.1  How,  one  thinks,  the  North- 
men (if  any  ambassadors  from  Denmark  were  present)  must 
have  stared  at  such  a  ceremony,  remembering  the  rough  speech 
which  prevailed  at  their  own  folk-things,  and  treasured  the 
memory  thereof  for  the  ears  of  their  countrymen.  We  see,  too, 
when  Lewis  was  minded  to  wed  a  second  time,  these  same 
grandees  bringing  the  fairest  of  their  daughters  to  him  that  he 
might  select  one  for  his  wife — more  after  the  fashion  of  an 
Eastern  caliph  than  a  Christian  king. 

All  public  life  had  been  brought  into  a  wise  order  since 
the  Merovingian  days.  Following  the  general  and  excellent 
custom  among  the  monarchs  of  his  time,  Lewis  was  constantly 
upon  the  move,  now  in  one  part,  now  in  another  of  his  vast 
dominions.2  Wherever  he  was,  he  sat  once  a  week  to  administer 
justice  —  not  ^/^/-ter-sessions  only  where  he  was.  3  The 
empire  ? — I  am  the  empire.  His  person  and  presence  only 
bound  into  a  whole  the  diverse  interests  of  Franks  and  Aqui- 
tanians,  of  Saxons  and  Provencals.  A  territorial  nobility  had 
begun  to  grow  up  in  the  place  of  the  nobility  of  service  which 
characterized  the  Merovingian  monarchy. 4  It  was  now  hardly 
possible  to  hold  one  General  Assembly  for  the  whole  of  the 
wide- stretching  empire.  Now  the  Placitum  was  held  at 
Orleans,  now  at  Nymuegen  or  Aix,  now  on  the  Lake  of  Con- 
stance, now  at  Augsburg  in  distant  Bavaria.  In  each  case  it 
would  be  only  the  grandees  most  closely  attached  to  the  person 
of  the  Emperor  and  those  from  the  neighbouring  country 
who  attended.  But  the  presence  of  the  ruler  and  his  im- 
mediate court  gave  a  unity  to  the  decisions  of  all.  And  every- 
where there  were  the  chosen  servants  of  the  emperor  speeding 

1  Ermoldus  Nigelhis,  i.  137-178,  iii.  42  (Pertz,  ii.  469,  &c). 

2  Anon.   Vita  HI .  Imp.  7  (Astronomer)  [Pertz,  ii.  610]. 

3  Formerly,  when  king  of  Aquitaine,  he  had  sat  thrice  a  week  (Ibid.). 

4  On  the  Courts  of  the  Merovingian  monarchs,  see  Fustel  de  Coulange, 
La  Monarchic  Franque. 


ADMINISTRA  TION  OF  LE  WIS.  237 

over  the  country  (missi  dominia,  their  official  name  x)  inquir- 
ing into  the  affairs  of  each  county  or  marquisate.  The  nobles, 
the  counts,  and  the  marquises  held  their  titles  by  office  not  by 
heredity  (not  as  yet),  and  were  liable  to  dismissal  for  neglect  of 
duty;  as — for  one  example — was  a  distinguished  soldier  of 
Charlemagne's  and  Lewis's  days,  Count  Balderic,  the  same 
whom  we  lately  saw  commissioned  to  raise  an  army  to  help 
Harald  back  to  his  throne  in  Denmark.  Balderic  was  after- 
wards made  Count  of  Friuli;  but  failing  to  defend  his  domains 
against  an  incursion  of  Bulgars,  he  was  deprived  of  his  com- 
mand.2 A  year  or  two  earlier  the  same  punishment  fell  upon 
certain  wardens  of  the  Spanish  marches,  when  an  inrush  of 
Arabs  and  rebellious  Goths  found  them  unprepared.  And  loud 
complaints  were  uttered  that  they  got  no  worse  punishment. 3 

All  seemed  at  peace,  even  in  those  regions  where  Charles's 
troubles  had  been  greatest.  The  Lombard  dynasty  had  dis- 
appeared ;  the  clangour  of  the  Saxon  war  had  died  away  ;  the 
Caliphs  of  Cordova  were  not  yet  strong  enough  seriously  to 
threaten  the  Spanish  marches ;  the  Baltic  nations  were  for  the 
moment  weaker  than  they  had  ever  been;  and,  as  we  saw, 
Christendom  had  already  sent  its  emissaries  into  Sweden,  as 
far  as  to  Lake  Malar. 

Yet  there  were  within  that  vast  body  of  the  Frankish  Empire 
forces  which  made  for  decay ;  as  there  are  forces  in  every 
body  vast  or  small,  making  for  decay,  and  through  decay 
for  new  growth.  It  is  not  difficult  to  understand  what  the  chief 
of  these  were.  We  have  spoken  of  the  two  foci  of  that  ellipse 
which  made  up  Western  Christendom — of  Aix,  the  capital  of 
the  worldly  kingdom,  and  of  Rome,  the  capital  of  the  Church. 

1  Or  missi  regit,  cf.  Du    Cange,  s.v.  and  the  description  in  Ermoldus, 
Carm.  ii.  489  sqq. 
-  Einhard,  Ann.  s.a.  828;  Anon.  Vita  (Aslron.)  (Pertz,  ii.  631). 
3  Eiuhard,  827. 


238  CIVIL  WAR. 

Let  the  equipoise  of  these  two  centres  of  force  be  altered,  and 
the  current  of  life  which  revolved  round  them  must  be  changed. 
At  present  the  popes  were  unable  to  stand  alone.  They  had 
thrown  off  allegiance  to  the  Eastern  emperors,  who  were  stained 
by  the  heresy  of  Iconoclasm ;  they  would  not  bear  the  pro- 
tection or  dictation  of  the  Lombard  kings.  But  they  were  not 
yet  strong  enough  to  rise  independent  of  all  secular  support, 
to  preserve  unassisted  those  territorial  possessions  which  they 
had  received  as  gifts  from  Pippin  and  Charlemagne.  Leo 
III.,  who  had  placed  the  diadem  upon  the  head  of  Charles, 
died  two  years  after  his  friend  and  protector.  His  successor, 
Stephen  V.,  undertook  the  arduous  journey  into  Francia  to 
obtain  the  ratification  of  his  election  by  Lewis.1  This  was  a 
great  triumph  for  the  house  of  Heristal.  Charles  had  received 
the  diadem  at  the  hands  of  Leo  III. ;  but  Lewis  did  not  wait 
for  the  sanction  of  the  Pope  before  he  entered  on  his  imperial 
succession.  On  the  other  hand  Stephen  acknowledged  the 
emperor's  right  of  veto  to  his  election.  Not  the  less  was 
he,  when  he  came  to  the  Court  of  Lewis,  received  by  the 
pious  emperor  with  every  honour.  Lewis  rode  to  meet  him, 
alighted  from  his  horse  and  held  the  Pope's  stirrup.  Stephen, 
in  his  turn,  anointed  Lewis  and  his  wife  Irmingard  Emperor 
and  Empress.  It  wTas  not  possible  that  these  two  great  powers 
of  the  Christian  Commonwealth  should  remain  for  ever  thus 
balanced ;  and  the  latter  years  of  Lewis's  reign  show  the 
beginning  of  that  long  struggle  between  Kaiser  and  Pope, 
which  lasted  all  through  the  Middle  Ages,  which -^aw  the 
triumph  of  one  party  under  Otto  III.,  of  the  other  under 
Gregory  VII.,  and  whose  memory  survived  in  the  bitter 
struggles  of  Guelphs  and  Ghibellines.  We  might  deem  that 
there  was  some  influence  in  the  magic  of  a  name  when  we  see 

1  Thegan,  Vita  LuJ.  Pie.  1 6,  17  (Pertz,  ii.  594). 


POPE  AND  CAESAR.  239 

the  first  overt  steps  towards  Papal  independence  taken  by 
Gregory  IV.,  the  fifth  of  the  popes  who  reigned  contempora- 
neously with  Lewis  the  Pius. 

The  interest  for  the  historian  of  this  period  of  history — the 
latter  years  of  Lewis's  reign — is  that  he  can,  as  through  a 
microscope,  perceive  almost  all  the  conflicting  forces  which 
moulded  the  history  of  mediaeval  Europe  coming  into  action, 
though  they  are  still  confined  within  the  compass  of  a  single 
state.  Side  by  side  with  the  struggles  between  Pope  and 
Kaiser,  we  see  the  principle  of  nationality  beginning  to  reassert 
itself.  Look  for  a  moment  at  the  empire  while  it  stands  un- 
divided. In  the  centre  lies  Francia  proper — not  France 
proper — which  extends  on  both  sides  of  the  Rhine,  eastward 
as  far  as  the  sources  of  the  Main,  westward  to  the  Atlantic,  but 
not  to  the  south  of  the  Loire.  Of  these  two  Francias,  the 
East  Frank  country  (Franconia),  though  it  had  the  name  of 
Old  Francia,  was  in  reality  rather  a  bastard  Frankland,  not  the 
country  of  the  old  Ripuarian  (Rhine  bank)  Franks,  nor  yet  of 
the  old  Saal  Franks  ;  but  land  conquered  long  ago  from  the 
Alamannians.  North  of  Francia  lay  Frisia  and  Saxony,  which, 
as  they  approached  the  Danish  borders,  shaded  off  more  and 
more  towards  rebellion  and  heathenism. 

We  read  in  the  year  837  of  the  energetic  steps  that  Lewis 
took  to  bring  the  Frisians  to  obedience;  and  years  after  Lewis's 
death  we  find  a  heathen  party  still  powerful  among  the  Saxons, 
and  the  younger  Lewis,  Lewis  the  German,  son  of  the  emperor, 
obliged  to  resort  to  unspeakable  severities  to  bring  it  into  sub- 
jection. Through  the  personal  attachment  of  the  Saxons  to  the 
emperor  this  heathen  or  conservative  party  seems  for  the 
moment  to  have  been  inactive.  Next  to  the  Saxons  came  the 
Thiiringians,  who,  as  they  bordered  not  on  any  heathen  Ger- 
man race,  may  have  been  without  the  centrifugal  tendencies  of 
the  two  forenamed  peoples      But  in  them  we  find  coming  into 


240  CIVIL   WAR. 

play  that  fatal  disunion  among  the  German  races  which,  in 
spite  of  all  the  heroism  of  her  sons,  has  kept  Germany  weak  so 
long.  For  some  while  the  Thiiringians  and  the  Alamannians 
were  on  ill  terms  with  their  neighbours  of  the  great  kingdom  of 
Bavaria.  Bavaria  always  held  true  to  her  own  king,  Lewis  the 
German,  third  son  of  Lewis  the  Pious,  whether  he  were  at  war 
with  his  father  the  emperor  or  afterwards  with  his  brother 
Lothair.  But  (for  many  years)  Alamannia  and  Thiiringia  went 
with  the  imperial  party.  Lewis  the  German  was  (so  to  say)  a 
Bavarian  first,  a  German  afterwards. 

And  in  the  west  there  were  peoples  very  different  in  character 
and  history,  but  inspired  with  the  same  spirit  of  nationality, 
and  a  longing,  wise  or  foolish,  for  Home  Rule. 

Between  the  mouths  of  the  Seine  and  Loire  jutted  out  the 
wedge-like  rocky  Armorica  or  Brittany,  with  its  population  of 
ancient  Armoricans  and  new  Britons  from  Cornwall ;  a  terri- 
tory never  so  much  as  half  incorporated  with  the  Frankish 
kingdom,  even  now  a  thorn  in  the  side  to  the  kings  of  Francia, 
as,  all  through  the  Middle  Ages,  it  was  to  be  a  thorn  in  the 
sides  of  the  kings  of  France. 

South  of  the  Loire  to  the  Pyrenees  stretched  Aquitaine, 
which,  like  Saxony,  was  peaceful  during  Lewis's  early  years, 
but  was  a  source  of  infinite  troubles  to  Lewis's  successor  in  the 
West.  Under  the  shadow  of  the  Pyrenees  lay  the  country  of 
the  wild  Basques,  who  had  inflicted  such  a  defeat  upon  the 
troops  of  Charlemagne,  and  might  reckon  themselves  indepen- 
dent of  the  Carling  house.  And  to  the  east  of  this  Biscay,  a 
little  county  or  marquisate  called  Gothia  or  Septimania,  and  in 
later  Middle  Ages  the  county  of  Toulouse.  It  was  a  march 
against  the  kingdom  of  the  Arabs  in  Spain ;  it  was  for  the 
present  a  peaceful  county  of  the  empire  ;  but  its  inhabitants 
(descendants  of  the  Visigoths  in  Gaul)  sighed  for  independence 
as  did  the  Aquitanians, 


DIVERSE  NA  TJONALITIES.  241 

Far  more  important  than  any  of  these  lesser  national  aspira- 
tions, there  was  the  rivalry  between  France — the  Latin-speaking 
half  of  the  empire — and  Germany,  which  was  already  beginning 
to  display  itself,  and  of  which  we  find  so  many  proofs  in  com- 
paring the  accounts  of  events  and  persons  by  the  French  and 
German  annalists  of  these  days. 

Curious  indeed  to  think  of  how  many  nationalities  and 
how  many  interests  this  empire  was  made  up:  of  toiling 
Frisians  and  Flemings,  divided  even  in  those  early  days  as 
they  are  still,  into  a  rural  and  a  manufacturing  population — 
weavers  slow,  laborious,  peaceful,  Christian  among  the  Christian; 
peasants,  wild,  half  heathen  still;1  of  lordly  Franks,  growing 
more  and  more  into  two  nationalities  as  they  stretched  across 
the  whole  breadth  of  the  empire ;  of  quick,  turbulent  Aquita- 
nians  for  ever  clamouring  after  Home  Rule,  and  slow,  turbulent 
Saxons,  some  of  whom  still  looked  back  to  the  days  of  Widu- 
kind  or  Nerthus  of  the  Woods  ;  of  Gascons ;  of  Goths ;  of 
Provencals,  the  most  mixed  of  all  populations,  the  descendants 
of  the  Romans — and  Provence  still  held  by  her  Roman  tradi- 
tions, and  the  forms  of  Roman  government — mingled  with  the 
descendants  of  the  Goths,  of  the  Saracens,  and  with  Jews.  These 
last  were  conspicuous  and  powerful  in  the  southern  provinces. 
Holding  the  keys  of  trade,  they  boasted  an  independence  of 
the  law  as  complete  as  that  of  any  Tammany  Ring  of  modern 
days.  They  had  the  best  intelligence  at  Court,  could  corrupt 
all  governments,  from  the  simp' est  city  administration  to  that 
of  the  greatest  counts  and  margraves.  Judith,  the  second  wife 
of  Lewis  the  Pious,  is  said  to  have  taken  the  Jews  under  her 
protection.     It  may  be  believed  that  there  was  a  strong  anti- 

1  A  most  striking  instance  of  the  survival  of  heathen  customs  among  the 
peasantry  of  the  Lower  Rhinelands  (Cornelimunster,  near  Aix),  in  the 
twelfth  century,  is  quoted  by  Grimm  {D.M.  i.  214,  ed.,  Meyer)  from  the 
Chron.  Rudolfi  (Pertz,  xii.  309),  circa  a.d.  1133.     Cf.  ante  p.  57. 

n 


242  CIVIL   WAR. 

Semitic  party  in  the  empire.  At  the  head  of  it  stood  most  of 
the  high  ecclesiastics — none  more  vehement  than  the  archbishop 
who  lived  most  within  the  circle  of  Jewish  influence,  the  famous 
Agobard  of  Lyons.1  A  mighty  shock  was  given  to  the  con- 
science of  Christianity  when  a  certain  learned  deacon,  Bodo, 
once  a  favourite  with  Lewis  and  his  empress,  apostatized  to 
Judaism,  let  his  hair  and  beard  grow,  girt  himself  with  a  sword, 
and  took  a  Jewish  name,  Eleazar.  He  married  a  Jewess,  and 
eventually  betook  himself  to  what  was  the  paradise  of  the 
nation   in   those    days,  the    equable    rule    of  the    Caliphs    of 

Cordova. 

The  papal  policy  itself  was  concerned  with  national  aspira- 
tions. Besides  the  aggrandizement  of  their  office,  the  popes 
headed  the  party  which  cried,  '  Italy  for  the  Italians.'  And  as 
formerly  they  had  got  rid  of  Goths  and  Lombards,  they  were 
determined  now  to  free  the  land  from  the  yoke  of  the  Franks. 

The  Frankish  custom  of  inheritance  again  made  for  disinte- 
gration. For  that  custom  required  the  equal  distribution  of 
possessions  among  the  legitimate  sons  of  the  deceased.  It  was 
by  good  fortune  that  only  one  legitimate  male  heir  had  sur- 
vived to  Charlemagne.  Charlemagne  had  intended  Italy  for 
Pippin;  and  after  Pippin  had  died  without  legitimate  heirs, 
his  natural  son,  Bernard,  was  allowed  to  retain  the  crown  of 
Italy,  and  he  himself  looked  upon  it  as  his  by  right.  It  was 
therefore  by  an  accident  that  the  vast  empire  of  Charlemagne 
descended  to  his  son  unbroken. 

But  however  far  Teutonic  custom  might  sanction  such  divi- 
sions, the  necessities  of  the  time  (or  what  seemed  the  neces- 
sities of  the  time),  and  still  more  the  dreams  of  far-sighted 
politicians  sanctioned  an  exactly  opposite  policy.  The  ideal 
of  that  policy  was  the  restoration  of  the  ancient  monarchy  of 

1  Agobard,  Dt  insolentia  Judaorum  ;  De  Jud.  Superstit.  (Migne,  t» 
104). 


THE  lDIVISIO  IMPERII:  243 

Rome,  the  seamless  garment  of  undivided  power,1  which  was, 
it  was  thought,  as  much  a  part  of  the  Divine  polity,  as  the 
flawless  robe  of  an  undivided  faith.  This  was  the  principle 
which  seemed  to  have  been  proclaimed  on  the  famous  Christ- 
mas Day  of  800,  and  which  the  great  statesmen-ecclesiastics  of 
this  age,  upheld — Wala,  of  Corbie,  the  king's  cousin;  Agobard 
of  Lyons,  the  most  accomplished  and  enlightened  ecclesiastic 
of  this  reign;  Ebbo  of  Rheims,  the  ambitious  but  far-sighted 
prelate. 

When  Lewis  had  that  nearly  fatal  accident,  whereof  we  spoke 
in  the  last  chapter,  which,  showing  him  the  frailty 
of  human  life,  gave  his  thoughts  so  serious  a  turn, 
he  bethought  himself  of  taking  measures  to  ensure  the  peaceable 
succession  of  his  sons.  A  state  paper  was  accordingly  drawn  up, 
known  in  those  days  as  the  Divisio  Imperii*  which  set  forth  the 
principles  of  succession.  Lewis  had  at  this  time  three  sons — 
Lothair,  Pippin,  and  a  younger  Lewis.  Lothair  was  to  succeed 
his  father  as  emperor,  and  reign  directly  in  all  parts  of  the 
empire  save  in  two  kingdoms,  Aquitaine  and  Bavaria,  which 
were  bestowed  on  his  brothers,  Pippin  and  Lewis.  But  they 
would  only  reign  as  under-kings,  subject  to  the  seniority  or 
seigneury  of  Lothair.3  Thus  we  see  that  when  the  Charta 
Divisionis  Imperii  was  drawn  up  the  Monarchia  idea  was 
dominant.  During  the  lifetime  of  his  father  the  kingdom  of 
Italy  was  assigned  to  Lothair. 

Bernard's  right  to  his  kingdom  was  not  recognized  by  the 
Charta  Divisionis,  and  on  the  promulgation  of  this  docu- 
ment he  made  an  attempt  at  rebellion  which  was  soon 
suppressed.  This  was  Italy's  first  stroke  for  independence 
since  she  lost  her  Lombard  kings.  Bernard  was  brought  as  a 
prisoner  to    Lewis,   who,  with  what  would  probably   then   be 

1  Dante,  Monarchia.  L'   Pertz,  Leges,  i.  198  sqq. 

3  Ibid,  Prcl".  and  Ca;>s.  4  s. 


244  CIVIL  WAR. 

deemed  by  most  an  act  of  unusual  clemency,  ordered  his  life 
to  be  spared,  and  that  he  should  only  be  blinded.1  But  the 
operation  was  clumsily  performed—  some  said  with  a  designed 
clumsiness  at  the  instigation  of  the  Empress  Irmingard ;  Ber- 
nard lingered  but  a  few  days  and  died.  However  much  public 
opinion  may  have  exonerated  Lewis,  his  conscience  did  not 
exonerate  him.  He  continued  to  brood  over  the  event ;  and 
years  after,  when  Charlemagne  or  any  earlier  king  would  have 
clean  forgotten  the  matter,  remorse  drove  him  to  do  public 
penance  for  his  sin.  That  Irmingard  repented  of  her  part 
in  the  business  we  are  not  told. 

The  year  following  Bernard's  death  Lewis  undertook  an 
expedition  into  Brittany,  and  made  more  way 
towards  reducing  this  people  to  a  real  subjection 
10  the  empire  than  any  of  his  predecessors  had  done.2  This 
was  in  818.  In  the  four  years  which  followed  there  were 
other  successes  :  some  upon  the  exactly  opposite  edge  of  the 
empire  to  Brittany,  in  Pannonia,  in  other  words  in  East 
Austria  and  Hungary  west  of  the  Danube.  Pannonia  had 
been  practically  independent  until  Lewis  sent  his  army  thither 
and  compelled  its  submission.  Whereupon  some  of  the  Slav 
peoples  farther  east  likewise  acknowledged  his  over-lordship  ; 
so  that  now  his  empire  almost  trenched  upon  that  of  the 
Turcoman  race,  the  Bulgars,  who  lay  upon  the  Lower 
Danube,  on  the  borders  of  the  Greek  Empire.  The  Khan  of 
the  Bulgars  sent  a  threatening  letter  to  Lewis,  warning  him 
not  to  overstep  his  boundaries.  And  while  all  this  was  going 
forward  in  the  East,  Pippin,  King  of  Aquitaine,  Lewis's  second 
son,  was  engaged  in  subduing  rebels  in  Gascony  (820),  and 
Harald,  as  we  saw,  was  being  helped  back  to  his  throne  in  Jutland. 

1  Astronomer  (Pertz,  ii.  622-3) ;  Thegan,  o.c.  22-3  (P.  ii.  596). 
a  The  Duke  of  Brittany,  Murcomannus,  was  slain.  Thegan,  l.c.  &C 
Murman  (Morwan)  Ermold,  Nigellus,  Hi.  55,  &c. 


BIRTH  OF  CHARLES  THE  BALD.  245 

One  sad  event  had  happened,  besides  the  death  of  Bernard. 
While  Lewis  was  away  upon  his  Brittany  expedition.  Irmingard, 
his  wife,  fell  sick,  and  almost  immediately  upon  his  return  she 
died.  It  was  within  a  year  of  Bernard's  death,  as  we  note,  of 
which  Irmingard  had  been  perhaps  guilty.  Whether  Lewis 
knew  this  or  thought  of  this  we  do  not  know.  What  we  do 
know  is  that  at  the  death  of  the  empress  he  fell  into  such  a 
condition  of  melancholy  or  remorse  that  the  fear  was  enter- 
tained that  he  would  now  imitate  his  great-uncle  Carloman 
and  retire  into  a  cloister.  In  this  fear  his  courtiers  hastened 
to  press  him  to  remarry.  They  brought  the  fairest  of  their 
daughters  to  him  that  he  might  select  from  them  a  wife.  His 
choice  fell  upon  a  beautiful  and  gifted  Judith,  daugh- 
ter  of  Count  Welf  of  Altdorf—  Bavarian  Swiss  upon 
the  father's  side,  Saxon  on  the  mother's.1  From  this  marriage 
more  than  from  anything  else  sprang  the  ten  thousand  ills  which 
descended  upon  the  Frankish  Empire  and  upon  Christendom 
during  the  next  hundred  years.  This  second  marriage  did  not 
immediately  make  a  change  in  the  disposition  of  the  territory 
of  the  empire  ;  Lewis  had  at  first  only  a  daughter  by  this 
second  marriage,  and  the  Divisio  Imperii  was  confirmed  in 
821.  It  was  not  until  two  years  after  this  that  Judith  gave 
birth  to  her  first  and  only  male  child,  Charles. 

The  year  previous  to  that  of  Charles's  birth  Frankland  had 
beheld  with  wonder  Lewis,  on  whose  conscience 

,  A.D.  822 

the  memory  of  Bernard  s  death  lay  heavy,  doing 
public  penance  therefor,2  an  act  of  the  saint  king's  the 
like  of  which  had  not  been  heard  of  till  now.  The  year 
itselt  of  Charles's  birth  was  an  annus  infaustus,  did  the 
augurs  of  the  time  note  as  much.  It  was  a  year  of 
earthquakes    and    divers    supernatural     signs    which    greatly 

1  Thegan,  c.  26.  2  Anon.  Vita  HI.  Imp.  c  35  ;  Ann.  Xant.  a.a» 


246  CIVIL   WAR. 

disquieted  the  soul  of  the  emperor.  Perhaps  the  birth  of  the 
young  prince  himself  was  the  most  inauspicious  sign  of  all, 
pregnant  of  future  ills  which  it  needed  no  great  prophet  to 
foretell. 

II. 

The  year  of  the  baptism  of  Harald  at  Mainz  there  was  an 

alarm  from  the  Spanish- Arabic  quarter.   Many  years 
A.D.  826.  .  ,  .,        ...   T_.  r    a      •    •  i 

previously,  while   still  King  of.  Aquitaine  merely, 

Lewis  had  made  two   briefly  successful    expeditions    in   that 

direction.    He  had  taken  Lerida  and  Huesca,  and  had  defeated 

the  troops  of  the  Emir  Zado,  Zaddo  ( Saad  ?)  under  the  walls  of 

Barcelona,  which  he  then  took  and  returned  triumphant.1 

Now,  however,  the  Arabs  in  their  turn  came  breaking  the 

Christian    boundaries,    streaming    up    to    the    Pyrenees   into 

Gothia,  where  their  leader,  Abu-Merwan,  united  forces  with  a 

rebellious  Gothic  army  under  a  certain  Aizo.2   Skyey  prodigies, 

not  unlike  those  which  thirty  years  ago  had  affrighted  the  men 

of  Northumbria,  were  visible — a  phantom  army  seen  fighting  in 

mid-air. 3     Several  of  the  Imperial  counts  and  wardens  of  the 

marshes,  taken  all  unprepared,  were  defeated.     The  disaster 

might  have  been  more  serious  had  it  not  been  for  Bernard, 

Count  of  Gothia,  who  appears  almost  for  the  first  time  upon 

the  scene  on  this  occasion,  but  whose  life  and  tragic  end  were 

henceforth  to  be  closely  linked  with  the  fortunes  of  the  Carling 

house.     No  one  save  Bernard  came  well  out  of  the  business  * 

— not  Lewis  himself,  who,  unlike  the  Lewis  of  earlier  days,  did 

not  hasten  in  person  to  protect  his  marches  and  to  avenge  the 

insult.   '  When  the  emperor  heard  the  evil  tidings  he  determined 

1  Einhard,  8oi  ;  Anon.  Vita  HI.  I.  (Pertz,  ii.  6n) ;  Ermoldus  Nigellus, 
Carmina,  i.  67-537  (Pertz,  ii.  468-477). 

2  Einh.  827  ;  Astron.  c.  40,  41.  3  Astron.  c.  41. 

4  Nithard,  i.  3.  ;   Einhard,  a.a.  827  ;  Astron.  I.e.     Matfrid  of  Orleans 
was  one  of  the  culpable  generals,  Hugo  the  Timid  another. 


JUDITH  >S  A  MBITION.  247 

to  send  reinforcements  for  the  defence  of  the  kingdom  :  then 
he  continued  his  limiting  in  Conpiegne.7  x  Next  year  at  the 
Placitum  held  at  Aix  there  were  loudly  uttered  complaints  of 
the  conduct  of  the  emperor's  officers.  They  were,  however, 
not  punished,  'only  deprived  of  their  commands.'2 

Count  Bernard  was  the  son  of  the  famous  William,  Count  of 
Toulouse,  Lewis's  old  governor,  whose  memory  the  popular 
voice,  the  voice  alike  of  priests  and  people,  deservedly 
honoured.  Were  it  only  in  memory  of  his  father,  Bernard 
might  be  expected  to  stand,  as  he  did  stand,  in  high  favour  at 
Court.  But  he  was  himself  a  very  brilliant  personage,  who  was 
not  only  in  high  favour  with  Lewis,  but,  malignant  whispers 
said,  in  higher  favour  still  with  the  young  empress.  To  these 
malignant  whispers  and  to  Bernard's  many  enemies  Judith's 
stepsons  soon  began  to  lend  their  ears ;  and  men  said  more 
loudly  that  young  Charles  was  no  brother  of  theirs,  no  son  of 
Lewis's,  but  of  Judith's  and  Count  Bernard's  3 — an  accusation, 
be  it  said,  which,  as  fully  as  such  accusations  can  be,  was  dis- 
proved in  after-years. 

Judith's  misdeeds  were  not  this  ;  but  her  restless  scheming 
to  carve  a  portion  out  of  the  empire  as  an  inheritance  for 
her  own  son  Charles  would  have  provoked  a  rebellion  in  any 
case.  And  behind  and  beyond  the  question  of  right  between 
this  or  that  inheritor,  behind  Judith's  maternal  ambition  and 
the  discontent  of  her  stepsons,  there  lay  a  much  greater  question 
which  these  domestic. quarrels  only  served  to  bring  to  the  front. 
It  was  a  question  of  the  whole  meaning  and  character  of  that 
new  Western  Empire  which  had  arisen  upon  the  ruins  of  the 
old.  Was  it  the  indissoluble  God-appointed  monarchy,  the 
seamless  garment  about  which  men  wrote  in  after-years,  or 
was  it  only  the  inheritance  of  the  Carling  House,  to  be  redivided 

1  Astronomer,  c.  41.  2  Ibid.  c.  42. 

3   Vita  Walce  (Ratbert)  ii.  ;  Agobard,  Opera,  367  ;  cf.  Thegan,  c.  36. 


248  CIVIL  WAR. 

as  its  possessor  might  choose?  On  one  side  or  the  other 
the  statesmen  and  place-hunters  of  the  day  began  to  take 
their  stand. 

At  length  Judith  contrived  that  the  Charta  Divisionis  should 
be  so  far  set  aside,  that  a  fresh  slice  was  carved 

AD   829. 

out  of  the  empire  as  a  portion  for  the  child  Charles 
— Alamannia  or  Swabia.1  Bernard,  who  had  grown  higher  and 
higher  in  Court  favour,  was  made  the  regent  of  Alamannia  in  the 
infant's  name.  At  the  same  time  he  received  the  office  of  High 
Chamberlain,  the  highest  post  at  Court ;  and  matters  grew  ripe 
for  a  revolt.2 

This  was  in  829,  three  years  after  the  Mainz  baptism. 
Next  year,  by  persuasion  of  Bernard  (says  one 
chroniclers)  Lewis  undertook  an  expedition  into 
Brittany :  by  persuasion  of  Bernard,  but  still  more  it  was 
thought  of  a  certain  traitorous  Count  Lantbert  (Lambert),  who 
falsely  represented  the  Duke  of  Brittany  as  meditating  a  revolt. 
Lantbert  had  his  own  ends  to  serve ;  as  appeared  before  long. 
For  now  the  emperor,  who  had,  strangely  enough,  summoned 
his  ban  in  the  middle  of  the  Lenten  fast  4  found  that  only  a 
very  few  of  his  grandees  had  obeyed  the  summons.  He 
began  his  march,  however.  On  their  side  the  nobles  of  the 
West,  who  had  not  come  when  called  upon,  had  been  hastening 
elsewhither  to  meet  Pippin,  King  of  Aquitaine  :  and  he,  instead 
of  joining  his  father  upon  the  borders  of  Brittany,  had  marched 
to  Paris.  There  the  standard  of  revolt  was  first  raised ;  and 
Paris  took  her  first  lesson  in  the  art  of  conquering  her  king. 
A  message  came  from  the  elder  brother,  Lothair,  in  Italy,  that 
he  was  on  his  way  to  France,  to  put  himself  at  the  head  of  the 

■  Rather  more  than  Alamannia — terrain  Alamannicam   et   Redicam   et 
partem  aliquam  Burgundies.     Thegan,  o.c.  35. 

2  Einhard,  a.a.  829  ;  Ann.  Fuld.  a.a.  ;  Nithard,  o.c.  i.  3  (Pertz,  ii.  653). 
1  Annates  Bertiani.  a.a.  (Pertz,  vol.  i.  p.  423) 
.  inn.  Mettens.  830  (P.  i.  336)  ;  cf.  Pertz.  Leg.  i.  368. 


OUTBREAK  OF  THE  REBELLION.  249 

malcontents.  Lewis's  tioops  were  falling  away  and  he  could 
not  rely  on  those  that  remained.  Fippin  marched  from  Paris 
to  Orleans  and  from  Orleans  to  Verberie.1  The  minister  who 
had  abused  the  confidence  of  the  emperor  was  arraigned,  and 
anon  he  and  Judith  were  openly  accused  of  adultery.  Bernard 
fled  to  his  own  county.2  The  empress,  seeking  refuge  at  Laon, 
was  seized,  forced  to  take  the  veil,  and  thrust  into  a  convent 
at  Poictiers ;  and  Lewis  was  solemnly  deprived  of  the  insignia 
of  his  power. 

And  now  Lothair  came  from  Italy,  joined  forces  with  his 
brother,  and  took  the  lead  of  the  revolt.  The  rebels  had 
missed  Count  Bernard,  but  they  seized  and  imprisoned  his 
brother  Herebert — according  to  one  authority  they  put  out  his 
eyes ;  and  all  that  summer  Lewis  was  emperor  only  in  name. 3 

The  rebellion  was  a  French  one,  hatched  by  the  Latin-speak- 
ing subjects  of  the  emperor.  The  Germans  had  no  part  in  it ; 
nor  had  the  younger  Lewis,  the  youngest  of  Irmingard's  sons. 
By  him,  followed  by  all  the  faithful  Germans  and 
Saxons,  the  emperor  was  presently  restored  ;  and 
at  a  council  held  at  Nymuegen  he  seemed  to  have 
recovered  his  former  greatness.*  But  next  year, 
while  Pippin  had  stolen  away  from  Court,  s  news  came  that  this 
same  Lewis  had  broken  into  Charles's  kingdom  of  Alamannia 
and  was  harrying  it  with  fire  and  sword.6  Before  long  all  the 
three  sons  of  Lewis  were  in  revolt  together,  and  we 

AD  833 

rind  them  lying  in  that  great  plain  of  the  Upper 
Rhine  which  has   been    so    often    the  battle-ground   between 
different  nationalities  and  different  creeds.     The  emperor  was 
at  Worms,  still  it  seems  trusting  more  to  his  'German  subjects 

1  Nithard,  i.  3  ;  cf.  Palgrave,  Norm,  and  En^l.  i.  282. 

2  Nithard,  I.e.  3  Nithard,  I.e. 
4  Thegan,  37  (P.  ii.  598)  ;  Anon.  Vit.  36. 

s  An.  Bert.  a.a.  832  [831]  (P.  ii.  424).         6  An.  Bert.  a.a.  ;  Anon.  47. 


AD.  830. 
AJ).  831. 


250  CIVIL   WAR. 

than  to  the  Franks  ' ;  albeit  Lewis  the  German  was  now  upon 
the  side  of  the  rebels. 

What  is  of  most  significance  is  that  Pope  Gregory  was 
also  here,  having  hurried  up  from  Italy,  professedly  to  act 
the  part  of  a  peacemaker  between  the  rival  armies,1  really  it  is 
believed  tampering  with  the  imperial  soldiers  in  the  interests 
of  his  immediate  lord,  Lothair.  At  last  a  shameful  day  arrived 
— which  history  still  remembers — when  we  see  the  Imperial 
army  all  drawn  up  '  in  a  plain  between  Basle  and  Strassburg,' 2 
the  plain  of  Colmar,  and  the  rebel  army  opposite,  and  when 
presently  the  unhappy  Lewis  finds  that  his  soldiers  are  desert- 
ing to  the  enemy  as  fast  as  their  leg's  will  carry  them ;  until  at 
last  he  is  obliged  to  say,  in  his  kindness  of  heart,  '  Do  not  stay 
with  me.  Do  not  be  the  last  to  desert  me,  lest  you  get  into 
trouble  with  your  new  masters.'  In  memory  of  which  scene  of 
treachery  the  field  was  called  the  Field  of  Lies  (Liigenfeld)  3 
ever  after — ubi  plurimorum  fidelitas  extinda  est,  '  for  there  died 
the  faith  of  many  a  subject.' 4 

This,  then,  was  in  the  midsummer  of  a.d.  833.  One  year 
before  this,  far  away  in  the  west,  Thorgisl  and  his  great  royal 
fleet  had  come  to  Ireland  ;  and  the  men  were  engaged  in  sad 
ravage  of  all  the  holy  places  there,  plundering  Rathin, 
Clondalkin,  and  the  rest.  This  year,  too,  Ecgberht  in  England 
was  summoning  his  '  Witan  '  to  consult  upon  the  defences  of 
the  kingdom.  And  he  was  not  too  soon,  for  the  attack  on 
Sheppev  followed  two  years  after.  And,  as  it  chanced,  follow- 
ing almost  immediately  upon  the  scene  at  the  Colmar  plain, 
the  northern  troubles  began  once  more  upon  the  Continent,  as 
we  shall  have  presently  to  relate.  Nay,  we  may  take  this  as  the 

1  Ann.  Fuld.  a.  a.  ;  Ann.  Xant.  a. a. 
a_Thegan,  o.c.  42  (Pertz,  ii.  42) ;  Anon.   Vita. 

3  Campus  mentitus,  Ann.  Bert.  (P.  i.  426)  ;  Campus  mendacii,  Thegan. 

4  Thegan,  l-.t. 


MERCILESS  VICTORS.  251 

epoch  of  the  real  effective  beginning  of  the  Viking  raids  in 
Continental  Europe — the  first  genuine  taste  of  that  furor 
Normannorum  which  was  to  call  forth  so  many  prayers. 

III. 

The  victors  used  their  triumph  cruelly;  and  the  Franks 
could  not  see  without  anger  and  shame  their  aged  emperor 
dragged  as  it  were  behind  the  car  of  his  son,  powerless  and 
alone.1  For  Judith  had  been  sent  into  a  convent  far  away 
beyond  the  Alps— to  Tortona — and  even  the  ten-year-old 
Charles  was  taken  from  both  his  parents  and  imprisoned  in 
the  Abbey  of  Priim.2  Could  Lothair  have  looked  down  the 
stream  of  time,  he  would  have  seen  himself,  grown  weary  of 
life's  struggles,  coming  to  seek  shelter  in  that  same  monastery 
of  Priim  for  a  few  short  months  on  the  way  from  his  throne  to 
the  grave.  But  at  this  moment  no  shadow  of  the  future  over- 
cast his  fortune.3  His  thoughts  were  how  he  could  by  force 
or  persuasion  make  his  father  take  this  very  step  of  resigna- 
tion, and  retire  into  a  monastery  as  he  had  wished  to  do  after 
the  death  of  Irmingard.  Then  all  would  be  well.  Ebbo,  the 
ungrateful  Ebbo,  who  owed  all  his  elevation  to  his  foster- 
brother  the  emperor,  called  together  an  ecclesiastical  council 
and  solemnly  pronounced  the  deposition  of  Lewis  the  Pious.* 
Christendom  cried  out  at  these  indignities  offered  to  its  head, 
and  the  Pope  himself  was  ashamed  of  the  part  which  he  had 
played. 5  Nor  were  the  brothers  of  Lothair  well  content  to 
see  that  all  the  profits  of  rebellion  fell  to  him.     Lothair  was 

1  Ann.  Bert.  (P.  i.  427).  9  Thegan,  o.c.  42;  Astron.  48. 

3  Lothair  styles  himself  Rex  in  orient ali  Francia  from  a.d.  833  onwards. 
The  portions  of  the  empire  obtained  by  Lewis  and  Pippin  are  sufficiently 
indicated  in  Ann.  Bert.  834  (P.  i.  427). 

4  Thegan,  c.  44  ;  Ann.  Bert.  s.a. 

5  Astron.  48;  Nithard,  i.  c.  4.  Not  unimpeachable  authorities  certainly 
on  such  a  point.     But  see  Diimmler,  Gesch.  d.  Ostf.  R.  i.  p.  8^,  note. 


252  CIVIL  WAR. 

now  emperor,  receiving  ambassadors  from  far  and  near,  from 
the  Slavonic  provinces,  from  the  Greek  emperor.  Some,  no 
doubt,  had  set  out  while  Lewis  was  still  upon  the  throne.1 

There  was   no  principle  of  policy  governing  the  different 

parties    in   these   revolts — each  was    for   himself,    and   chaos 

seemed   come   again ;    wherefore  it  has    not   been    necessary 

for  us  to   follow  in  detail  the  early  years  of  this  civil  war. 

But  let  us  note  one  saving  feature  through  it  all,  the  extreme 

reluctance  on  either  side  to  shed  Christian  blood.     One  little 

spurt  of  actual  battle  (the  first   in    this    contest)   marks  the 

proceedings  of  the  next    year,  when   Pippin  and 

Lewis  of  Germany  were  once  more  ranged  upon 

the  side  of  their  father  and  Lothair  was  once  more  deposed,2 

He  retired  into  Italy  with  the  leaders  of  his  party,  Matfrid, 

Count  of  Orleans,  and  Wala,  the  Abbot,  once  of 

Corbie,  now  of  Bobbio.3      Even  there  he  did  not 

feel  himself  secure,  but  set  to  work  to  fortify  the  passes  of 

the  Alps. 

Heaven  itself  seemed  to  pronounce  his  guilt 
He  was  prostrated  by  a  dangerous  fever.4  We 
shall  see  how  many  times  the  pestilential  air  of  Italy  revenged 
itself  upon  the  descendants  of  her  conqueror,  Charlemagne. 
It  was  noted  how  many  of  Lothair's  trusted  counsellors — or, 
as  the  imperial  party  would  have  said,  chief  authors  of  all  the 
troubles  of  the  realm— fell  ill  at  the  same  time.  Some  died, 
as  did  Wala  and  Matfrid.5     The  one  was  the  greatest  states- 


1  Ann.  Bert.  ;  Astron.  49. 

a  Ann.  Bert.  (P.  i.  428);  Nithard  (P.  ii.  653);  Anon.  52;  Thegan, 
52-55.  It  was  really  little  more  than  a  skirmish,  though  Nithard  speaks  of 
an  '  innumerable  multitude  '  as  having  fallen. 

3  Agobard  of  Lyons  and  Ebbo  of  Rheims  were  deprived  of  their  sees  in 
a.d.  835  (Anon.   Vita.  c.  54  ;  Bert.  s.a.  835). 

*  Thegan,  add.  (P.  ii.  603). 

5  Thegan,  55  ;  Lantbei  t  and  Hugo  d.  837  ;  Ann.  F, 


FALL  OF  LOTH  AIR.  253 

man,  the  other  the  most  distinguished  general,  in  the  party  of 
Lothair. 
a  ™  a**  The  emperor  would  doubtless  have  pursued  his 

A.D.  00 7 .  .        . 

son  still  farther,  but,  by  a  strange  coincidence,  the 
Vikings  stepped  in  in  the  North  and  obliged  Lewis  the  Pious 
to  pause  in  his  march  towards  Italy.  For  the  last  three  years 
the  Danes  had  been  harrying  in  Frisia.1  This  year  they  fell  with 
great  fury  upon  Walcheren  Island  and  on  Dorstad — that  rich  and 
tempting  town — plundered  it,  and  burnt  a  great  part.2  Lewis 
was  compelled  to  abandon  his  Italian  expedition  and  to 
collect  troops  to  defend  the  north.  He  himself  hurried  up 
to  Nymuegen,  whence  he  could  see  the  fires  of  the  Danish 
devastation. 3  But  the  Vikings  had  not  yet  grown  so  bold  as 
to  hazard  an  engagement  with  the  emperor  in  person ;  and  as 
Lewis  advanced  they  retreated,  returned  to  their  ships,  and 
sailed  away  in  safety.     But  they  had  saved  the  fate  of  Lothair. 


IV. 

For  those  who  chiefly  governed  the  policy  of  Lewis,  Judith, 
the  empress,  most  of  all,  had  objects  more  near  at  heart  than 
the  difficult  and  profitless  task  of  crushing  the  King  of  Italy. -» 
The  provisions  of  the  Charta  Divisionis  had  been  long  ago 
set  aside  with  the  consent  even  of  the  majority  of  the  first 
fomentors  of  the  rebellion  made  for  its  maintenance  ;  and  at 
every  fresh  return  of  the  elder  Lewis  to  power  the  portion 
of  Charles  the  Bald  in  the  empire  was  increased.  Pippin 
was   presently   induced    to    corisent    to    the  endowment   of 


1  The  burnt  Antwerp  and  '  Witla  '  on  the  Meuse  ;  A.Fuld.  and  A.  Xant. 
835-6. 

2  Ann.  Bert.  ;  Fuld.  ;  Xant.  837. 

3  Astron.  836  ;  Thegan,  add.  (Pertz,  ii.  604). 

4  Cf.  Ann.  Bert.  a. a.  836. 


254  CIVIL  WAR. 

_  Charles  with  a  portion  of  Neustria.1    At  the  same 

A.D.  83S. 

time  his  father,  the  emperor,  girt  Charles  with  a 
sword,  in  token  of  his  having  arrived  at  manhood  (he  was 
now  fifteen),  and  he  himself  placed  a  crown  upon  Charles's 
head.2 

But  Lewis  and  Lothair  had  been  no  parties  to  this  arrange- 
ment, and  next  year  there  were  rumours  of  a  meeting  between 
the  two  brothers  in  the  Alpine  passes.3  Before  long  Lewis 
was  openly  in  arms  once  more.  He  probably  looked  for  the 
support  of  his  brother,  but  it  never  came ;  so  he  had  to  give 
way,  and  see  himself  robbed  of  Saxony,  which  for  some  time 
past  had  formed  a  portion  of  his  German  kingdom,  and  which 
Charles  now  received  in  addition  to  the  fairest  portions  of 
Francia — the  '  douce  France  '  of  the  Chansons  de  Geste.  And 
these  arrangements  had  scarcely  been  completed  when  Pippin 
of  Aquitaine,  the  second  son  of  the  emperor,  died.4  He  left 
behind  him  a  son  of  the  same  name,  beautiful,  wild,  and 
fearless,  not  only  the  natural  successor  to  his  father,  but  a 
natural  king  among  the  people  of  the  country  where  his  father 
had  ruled — ipsis  Hibemis  Hibernior — more  quick,  more  tur- 
bulent and  brave,  than  the  Aquitanians  themselves.  Never- 
theless, Lewis  the  emperor  refused  to  ratify  Pippin's  claim  — 
he  was  not  fit,  he  said,  to  rule  ;  and  young  Charles,  still 
scarcely  seventeen,  not  more  than  one  year  older  than  this 
second  Pippin,  had  Aquitaine  added  to  his  vast  domains. 

At  this  new  injustice  Lewis  the  German  rose  once  more  in 
loud,  active  resistance  and  complaint.  He,  shorn  of  half  his 
power,  was  to  see  his  young  brother  with  such  a  Benjamin 
portion  of  two  kingdoms.     It  was  not  safe  to  have  both  the 

1  Nithard,  6  (P.  ii.  653-4),  where  is  given  in  exact  detail  the  territory 
assigned  to  Charles. 

2  Nithard,  I.e.  3  Ann.  Bert.  ;  Ami.  Fuld.  838  (Trent). 

4  Nithard,  i.  8  ;  Ann.  Fuld.  a. a.  (Nov.) ;  Ann.  Bert.  (Dec.)  ;  Anon.  Vita 
(Jan.,  839).     The  correct  date  is  December. 


RE-DISTRIBUTION  OF  IANDS.  255 

surviving  sons  of  Irmingard  for  enemies,  and  Judith  cast  about 
to  see  to  which  she  should  make  advances.  Lothair's  natural 
ties  were  all  to  his  brother  Lewis.     He  had,  too, 

A.D.  839 

done  Judith,  as  a   mother  and   as  a  wife,  all  the 
injuries  which  a  man  could  inflict  upon  a  woman.     But  the 
natural   bonds    neither  of  love  nor   of  resentment  interfered 
with  the  policy  which  brought  these  two  into  alliance.     The 
emperor  was  visibly  failing ;  his  lungs  were  gravely  affected. 
But  his  name  and  his  character  still  commanded  a  respect 
which  none  of  his  successors  could  count  upon.     Still,  more- 
over, it  was  deemed  legitimate  for  the  emperor  to  alter  the 
succession  by  will.     No  law,  or  even  strict  custom,  prevented 
him  from  passing  over  his  eldest  son.     If  but  once  Lothair's 
title  and  succession  were  assured  beyond  all  cavil,  he  could, 
no  doubt,  dispose  soon  enough  of  the  claims  of  his  upstart 
brother.     So  he  argued  probably.     Judith,  on  her  side,  knew 
that  at  her  son  Charles's  age  all  thought  of  a  nomination  as 
heir  of  the  empire  was  out  of  the  question  ;  and,  foreseeing,  as 
she  might  well  do,  the  approaching  death  of  her  husband,  she 
may  have  hoped  against  hope  that  she  could  secure  for  Charles 
the  friendship  and  protection  of  his  successor.     So  once  more 
a  distribution  of  lands  took  place.      Lothair's  portion  was  fixed 
for  Italy,  with  the  imperial  title,  for  Provence,  the  best  part  of 
Germany,  the  Frisian  and  a  part  of  the  Belgian  provinces.     To 
Charles  was  left  Neustria  and  Aquitaine,  a  territory  almost  as 
large  as  modern  France,  the  brightest  and  most  cultured  part 
of  Northern  Europe.1 

As  micrht  have  been  expected  when  the  news  of    . 
....  .  A.D.  840. 

this  last    partition    wras    made    known,   both   sides 

of  the  empire  sprang  into  rebellion.2     Aquitaine  would   not 

abandon   her   prince  ;    and    Lewis    the    Younger   summoned 

1   Xithard,  7 ;  -Ann.  Bert.  a.  839.  2  Nithard,  8. 


256  CIVIL  WAR. 

his  German  troops,  and  determined  to  try  the  fortune  of 
war  before  he  would  submit  to  such  a  spoliation.  His  father, 
Lewis,  feeble  as  he  was,  prepared  on  his  side  to  budde  on  his 
armour.  He  turned  first  to  Aquitaine,  which  he  soon  reduced 
to  an  apparent  submission  ;  then — weighed  down  though  he 
was  with  trouble  and  disease,  if  not  with  years — he  traversed 
with  unexampled  celerity  the  whole  breadth  of  Frankland  to 
come  to  the  encounter  wfch  Lewis.  The  emperor  could  hardly 
be  accounted  old ;  he  was  not  more  than  sixty-two.  But  his 
spirit  was  broken.  It  had  long  left  the  world.  Better  had  it 
been  for  all  if  he  had  retired  from  it  wholly  after  the  death  of 
Irmingard ;  for  nothing  but  evil  had  resulted  from  the  second 
marriage. 

Musing  sad  thoughts  like  these,  snatching  long  hours  for 
prayer  and  penance  which  were  due  to  rest,  stung  in  his 
tenderest  human  affections  by  the  undutifulness  of  his  children, 
and  wounded  on  the  spiritual  side  by  the  treachery  of  many 
among  the  ecclesiastics  whom  he  had  delighted  to  honour, 
what  tie  now  bound  the  emperor  to  life?  Could  even  his 
conscience  acquit  him,  enslaved  as  he  had  become  to  the 
ambition  of  Judith  and  to  an  unjust  and  exclusive  tenderness 
for  his  youngest  son  ?  If  young  Lewis,  the  most  honest  and 
hitherto  the  most  faithful  of  all  his  sons,  were  in  arms,  did  the 
fault  lie  chiefly  at  his  door  ?  But  still  Louis  the  Pious  was  the 
son  of  Charlemagne  ;  and  though  some  of  these  thoughts  must 
have  sat  heavily  upon  him,  he  did  not  pause  in  his  advance, 
nor  relax  in  his  efforts  to  assemble  an  army  large  enough  to 
crush  the  hopes  of  Lewis  the  German ;  and  when  the  full  im- 
perial power  was  put  forth,  treason  could  still  only  peep  to  what  it 
would.  So  soon,  therefore,  as  he  saw  his  father  approaching, 
Lewis  the  German  retreated  farther  eastward  into  the  Slavonian 
marches,  where  he  was  practically  unreachable,  and  lay  there  in 
wait  for  better  days. 


DEATH  OB  LEWIS  THE  PIOUS.  257 

The  emperor,  on  his  side,  stayed  his  advance.  He  had 
already  crossed  the  Rhine  ;  and  he  now  paused  by  one  of  those 
trans-Rhenine  fortresses  which  owed  their  origin  to  the  con- 
quests of  his  father  and  grandfather,  and  were  among  the  most 
speaking  memorials  of  the  activity  and  achievements  of  the 
early  Carling  princes.  This  one  was  at  a  passage  of  the  Maine 
called,  from  some  circumstance  now  forgotten,  the  Franks' 
ford — Frankfurt.  From  being  a  military  outpost,  a  march 
between  heathen  and  Christian  lands,  it  had  now  grown  to  be 
the  seat  of  an  imperial  palace  as  well  as  a  central  market  for 
these  districts,  and  was  destined  to  become  one  of  the  great 
marts  of  the  world.  At  this  place  Lewis  was  attacked  by  an 
acute  access  of  his  consumption  ;  he  could  take  no  nourish- 
ment, and  soon  appeared  to  be  rapidly  sinking.  He  made  a 
backward  movement  to  the  Rhine,  which  he  had  not  long  left ; 
and  as  the  summer  season  was  just  coming  on,  he  ordered  a 
shelter  to  be  erected  for  him  upon  one  of  the  islands  which  the 
stream  makes  in  its  rapid  course  after  it  has  been  swollen  with 
the  waters  of  the  Neckar  and  the  Maine,  just  where  it  leaves  the 
sunny  Rheingsu  to  plunge  into  its  narrower  channel  lower 
down — that  island  -familiar  enough  to  the  modern  tourist  as 
the  Pfalz  Insel,  where  another  imperial  Lewis,  Lewis  of 
Bavaria,  some  five  hundred  years  later,  built  the  castle  from 
which  it  takes  its  name.  Here  Lewis  might  see  the  storks 
flying  northwards  to  their  summer  homes,  the  crane  and  the 
bittern  fishing  in  the  pools,  the  hawks  hovering  above  the 
woods  which  darkened  the  banks  on  either  side,  and  beside  all 
listen  to  the  constant  murmur  of  the  rushing  stream.  It  was 
the  season  when  in  former  years  he  would  have  been  hunting 
in  woods  like  these,  near  familiar  Ingelheim  or  pleasant  Com- 
piegne.  Now  all  this  was  passed.  There  was  but  a  little 
time  left  now  to  make  his  peace  with  Heaven  and  leave  his 
last  injunctions  for  the  ordering  of  his  earthly  kingdom.     His 

iS 


258  CIVIL  WAR. 

thoughts  still  dwelt  upon  the  welfare  of  Charles,  his  Benjamin, 
and  he  commended  him — an  evil  choice — to  the  protection  of 
Lothair.  Trust  not  to  this  Reuben,  oh  Benjamin  :  trust  rather 
to  thine  own  valour  and  the  counsels  of  thine  undaunted 
mother,  Judith  of  Altdorf  ! 

And  on  this  pfalz  island,  upon  a  Sunday  morning,  the  mid- 
summer eve  x  of  the  year  840,  surrounded  by  some  of  his 
favourite  ecclesiastics,  '  muni]  '  fortified,'  as  the  Roman 
Catholics  say,  with  the  last  sacrament  of  the  Church,  died 
Lewis  the  Pious,  the  third  kingly  Carlovingian — 

Rex  Hludovicus,  pietatis  tantus  amicus 
Quod  pius  a  populo,  dictur  et  titulo. 

V. 

With  the  death  of  Lewis  died  the  Carling  Empire,  after  its 
short  life  of  forty  years,  during  the  last  ten  of  which  it,  like 
its  representative,  had  been  already  stricken  by  a  fatal  disease. 
The  spirit  of  dominion,  the  stable  source  of  all  power,  which 
had  rested  upon  the  helmet  of  the  Pippins  and  Charleses  of 
old  days,  and  seemed  to  follow  in  the  course  of  the  House  of 
Heristal,  shook  its  wings  and  fled  from,  their  descendants 
never  to  return.  The  majesty  of  the  Frankish  name  vanished 
too.  The  German  races — the  barbarians — who  had  so  often 
sided  with  the  emperor  when  the  Franks  were  united  to 
oppose  him,  and  had  by  their  seried  phalanxes  overawed 
their  former  masters,  felt  themselves  free.  Now  that  Lewis 
was  dead,  they  were  a  ready  prize  to  any  one  who  chose  to 
take  them  in  his  hand. 

And  the  younger  Lewis  who  had  so  long  been  king  of 
Bavaria,  and  had  identified  himself  with  German  thoughts 
and  ways,  and  who  for  a  short  time  had  been  in  the  full  sense 
a  king  of  the  German  nationalities,  was  ready  to  do  this. 

1  Ann.  B.  ;  Fuld.  ;  Nithard,  June  28;  cf.  Palgrave,  o.c.  i.  308-9. 


LOTH  AIR  AND  LEWIS  THE  GERMAN.  259 

At  the  moment  he  appeared  to  be  subdued.  Lothoir,  who 
had  outwitted  his  brother  by  suddenly  changing  sides  and 
gaining  favour  with  the  emperor,  seemed  to  reap  the  fruits  of 
this  timely  subservience  by  the  undoubted  title  he  possessed 
to  the  empire,  to  Italy,  and  to  all  the  lands  between  Bavaria 
(which  alone  remained  to  Lewis)  and  Neustria  and  Aquitaine, 
which  formed  the  kingdom  of  Charles.  Lothair  was  at  this 
moment  forty  five.  He  had  passed  beyond  the  age  when  men 
are  likely  to  display  unsuspected  qualities ;  and  he  had  hitherto 
shown  neither  wisdom  nor  honesty.  Craft  was  his  favourite 
weapon.  He  had  been  skilled  in  the  use  of  it  by  some  of  his 
worst  advisers  :  by  Count  Matfrid  and  by  his  father-in-law, 
Hugo,  that  timid  count  who  plotted  for  fear  of  counter-plots. 
We  may  allow  Lothair  personal  courage,  but  in  moral  courage 
and  resolution  and  constancy  he  was  almost  wholly  lacking. 
In  his  youth  he  had  been  credited  with  pious  and  studious 
tendencies,  and  it  was  chiefly  on  account  of  these  promising 
dispositions  that  he  was  so  early  chosen  to  share  with  his 
father  the  title  of  Augustus,  a  title  which  he  had  enjoyed 
since  his  twenty-third  year. 

The  next  surviving  brother  was  Lewis.  He  was  nine  years 
younger  than  Lothair,  and  therefore  now  thirty-six.  He,  like 
Lothair,  had  been,  or  been  supposed  to  be,  pious  and  studious 
in  early  years  ;  whereas  the  middle  one,  Pippin,  was  given  to 
wild  courses,  and  even,  it  is  said,  to  the  bottle,  in  which  respects 
he  was  followed  by  his  son,  Pippin,  the  present  pretender  to 
Aquitaine.  Stories  are  told  to  illustrate  the  extraordinary 
precociousness  and  aplomb  of  the  younger  Lewis,  which  may 
or  may  not  be  true.1  One  cannot  say  that  he  was  more  or 
less  rebellious  than  his  two  brothers- — who  all,  it  must  be 
owned,   had  excuse  for  rebellion.     But  among  his  own  sub- 

1  Mon.  Sansjall,  ii.  c.  IO. 


260  CIVIL   WAR. 

jects,  more  especially  among  his  original  ones,  the  Bavarians, 
he  was  a  wise  and  successful  ruler ;  his  success  is  witnessed  by 
the  unswerving  attachment  of  this  people  to  him  through 
good  and  evil  fortune ;  and  he  was  himself  of  an  undaunted 
and  constant  spirit. 

Charles,  the  half-brother,  was  as  yet  only  seventeen,  his 
character  scarcely  formed.  History  has  generally  been  severe 
upon  his  memory.  But  surely  our  sympathies  cannot  be 
wanting  for  the  unhappy  youth,  surrounded  by  so  many 
enemies,  destined  to  such  hard  struggles  through  all  the  years 
of  his  long  reign,  and  never  (despite  his  many  weaknesses 
and  many  failures)  wholly  giving  way  and  despairing  of  the 
republic.  The  fourth  of  these  four  spirits  of  discord  was 
the  younger  Pippin,  whom  a  great  part  of  the  Aquitaine 
nobility,  all  the  people  of  South  Aquitaine,  still  acknow- 
ledged as  their  rightful  king,  though  Aquitaine  was  counted 
among  the  dominions  of  Charles  the  Bald. 

The  master-stroke  in  Judith's  policy  before  the  death  of 
her  husband  lay  in  the  fact  that  she  had  contrived  to  hand 
over  to  Lothair  the  lands  which  had  been  taken  from  Lewis, 
instead  of  leaving  them  with  her  own  son  Charles.  Had 
Lothair  been  secure  of  his  position  he  would  have  cared  little 
about  the  struggle  between  his  younger  brothers,  except,  it  may 
be,  to  wait  until  they  had  weakened  each  other,  and  then,  if 
possible,  step  in  and  take  all  he  could  from  both  ;  and  if 
Lewis  and  Charles  had  been  left  face  to  face  the  former  would 
have  made  quick  work  of  the  latter.  Still,  so  obvious  seemed 
the  motives  which  urged  the  two  sons  of  Irmingard  to  an 
alliance,  that  to  a  dispassionate  onlooker  Charles's  most  pro- 
bable destiny  would  have  seemed  a  short  shrift,  or  at  least  an 
early  deposition.  It  was  Lothair's  arrogance  and  Lewis's  self- 
seeking  which  saved  him.  Lothair  was  in  Italy  when  the 
old  emperor  died ;  Lewis,  as  we  have  seen,  had  been  driven 


TRIUMPHAL  PROGRESS  OF  LOTHAIR.        261 

into  Bavaria.1  Before  his  elder  brother  had  time  to  cross  the 
Alps  and  arrive  in  the  middle  kingdom,  Lewis  had  once  more 
collected  his  troops,  had  entered  Alamannia  and  laid  siege 
to  Worms ;  and  thence,  leaving  the  besieging  army  in  the 
charge  of  his  generals,  had  crossed  into  Saxony  to  gain 
the  adherence  of  that  nation.  Meanwhile  Lothair  appeared 
north  of  the  Alps,  and  made  a  triumphant  progress  through 
the  middle  kingdom  to  Aix,  where  he  received  the  homage  of 
most  of  the  most  distinguished  of  his  father's  vassals.  They 
had  no  reason  for  withholding  this  homage ;  for  had  not 
Lothair  been  designated  by  Lewis  as  his  successor,  and  had 
not  all  the  midd'e  kingdom,  including  Frisia  on  one  side,  and 
most  of  Proveme  with  Burgundy  upon  the  other,  been  set  apart 
for  him  ?  Thus  we  find,  among  other  of  the  faithful  followers 
of  Lewis  the  Emperor,  his  half-brother  Drogo  of  Mainz  doing 
homage  to  the  eldest  son;  and  Hildwin  too  readily  came  over 
to  the  party  of  Lothair  when  he  made  his  appearance  west  of  the 
Meuse.2  Lothair  was  so  overjoyed  at  the  ovation  he  received 
that  he  scarcely  concealed  his  claims  to  pre-eminence  over  his 
brothers. 

And  now  followed  a  tedious  period  of  marching  and 
counter-marching  and  of  endless  negotiations,  which,  however, 
have  a  significance  of  their  own.  In  all  this  long  rivalry 
since  830,  a  state  of  things  which  was  really  civil  war,  there 
had  been  sca:cely  any  blood  yet  shed.  One  engagement  in 
which  Count  Odo  of  Orleans  had  fallen  under  the  attack  of 
Lothair*s  adhere;  ts,  the  brave  and  successful  Lambert  and 
Matfrid,  was  about  the  only  bloodshed  which  these  ten  long 
years  of  strife  had  to  acknowledge.  I  do  not  therefore 
suppose  that  it  was  due  to  mere  personal  timidity  on  the 
part  of  Lothair  that,  when    he    found    himself   drawn  up   in 

1  Nitbard,  ii.  1  (P.  ii.  655).  »  Jfithard,  ii.  3. 


262  CIVIL   WAR. 

battle  array,  now  opposite  Lewis  on  the  Rhine,  now  opposite 
Charles  by  the  Loire,  he  put  off  the  dreadful  arbitrement  of 
blood,  and  on  each  occasion  made  a  temporary  truce.  It 
was  not  want  of  personal  courage,  I  imagine;  but  it  was 
certainly  want  of  resolution  and  foresight.  Lothair  hoped,  no 
doubt,  that  the  sight  of  his  own  pre  eminent  position  would 
draw  away  from  Lewis  and  Charles  their  few  adherents,  and 
that  with  a  bloodless  victory  the  full  imperial  power  which 
his  father  had  swayed  would  soon  be  his.1  He  did  not  (and 
this  is  the  hardest  thing  in  the  world  to  do)  reckon  with  the 
change  of  the  times.  He  did  not  see  how  far  the  different 
portions  of  the  empire  had  drifted  apart  during  these  last  ten 
years  of  struggle  ;  how  hateful  to  the  Germans  was  the 
supremacy  of  the  Franks  ;  how  little  love  of  unity  there 
reigned  in  any  part  of  the  empire.  Everywhere  had  sprung 
up  the  demand  for  home  rule.  Half  of  the  Aquitanians 
would,  if  they  could,  have  their  own  king  Pippin  ;  but  they 
would  rather  be  joined  with  Neustria  than  with  the  whole 
heterogeneous  empire  which  Lewis  the  Pious  had  governed. 
So  the  forces  which  Lothair  deemed  would  be  working  for 
him  were  in  reality  making  fatally  against  his  hopes. 

Meantime  he  was  hesitating.  Pie  turned  first  to  Germany, 
and  came  face  to  face  with  Lewis's  army,  a  force  far  inferior 
to  his  own.  But  he  did  not  strike  quickly  and  strike  hard; 
rather  he  preferred  a  truce  for  six  months  ;  and  then  he  turned 
westward  towards  Neustria.2  Thereupon  all  Charles's  king- 
dom north  of  the  Loire  seemed  to  fall  from  him.  In  the 
south  of  Aquitaine,  too,  he  had  his  nephew  Pippin  in  arms. 
His  case  seemed  hopeless.  But  Charles  would  not  resign 
without  a  struggle ;  and,  collecting  such  an  army  as  he  could, 
he   marched   against  Lothair,    and    met    him    near   Orleans. 3 

1  Cf.  Nithard,  ii.  4  and  7.  2  Nithard,  ii.  1. 

3  Id.  ii.  4, 


PREPARATIONS  FOR  BATTLE.  263 

Again,  however,  the  emperor  shunned  the  shock  of  battle ; 
and  a  six  months'  truce  was  made  with  Charles.  Back  again 
therefore  to  Lewis,  who  had  now  fortified  himself  upon  the 
Rhine  ;  while  Charles,  as  the  way  was  left  open,  or  only 
defended  by  a  guard  which  Lothair  had  left,  crossed  the 
Seine,  rolled  back  Lothair's  army  of  observation,  and  marched 
over  the  Maas  into  Lothair's  own  territory.1  The  young 
emperor  meantime  had  made  his  way  across  the  Rhine,  had 
gained  over  the  most  of  the  adherents  of  Lewis,  who,  in  his 
turn,  was  obliged  to  retire  far  back  to  the  eastern  limit  of  his 
Bavarian  kingdom. 

Lothair  had  still  the  game  in  his  own  hands,  and  he  had 
not  yet  fought  a  single  battle ;  but  instead  of  advancing  to 
crush  his  youngest  brother  he  spent  his  time  in  Easter 
festivities  and  general  rejoicings  at  Aix,  safe  in  the  middle 
of  his  own  imperial  territories.  Meantime  Charles  was  making 
way.  Most  of  the  Frankish  nobles  had  again  changed  sides 
and  come  over  to  him  ;  he  had  advanced  his  army  as  far  as 
Attigny,  and  at  the  same  time  Judith  was  hurrying  up  with 
another  army  which  she  had  gathered  in  Aquitaine.  Just  as 
Lothair  had  finally  made  up  his  mind  to  attack  Charles,  and 
the  latter  had  made  a  sort  of  backward  movement  to  join  his 
mother,  news  came  that  Lewis  had  gathered  fresh  forces  and 
had  marched  out  of  Bavaria.2  Lothair  had  left  an  army  to 
hold  Swabia  and  to  protect  the  Rhine,  but  Lewis  drove  it 
before  him,  and  in  a  battle  in  Riesgau  (May,  841),  broke 
it  in  pieces,  and  pushed  on  across  the  river.  Lothair  had  no 
time  to  interpose.  At  length  (June,  841)  Lewis  and  Charles 
effected  a  junction  at  Chalons  sur  Marne.  Lothair  was  not  far 
off  near  the  Loire. 

It  was  a  tremendous  moment.     All  the  forces  of  the  empire 

1  Nithard,  ii.  6.  a  Id.  ii.  9. 


264  CIVIL  WAR. 

were  marshalled  upon  one  side  or  the  other.  For 
Pippin  was  on  his  way  from  Aquitaine  with  a  con- 
tingent to  the  army  of  Lothair.  Had  at  last  the  long  years  of 
disturbance  come  to  this,  that  Christians  and  subjects  of  the 
same  empire  were  about  to  fly  at  each  other's  throats  in  a 
death-wrestle  ?  Lewis  and  Charles  could  not  quite  persuade 
themselves  that  there  was  no  alternative.  As  their  father  had 
always  done,  even  when  in  overwhelming  superiority,  they  had 
recourse  first  to  peaceful  negotiations.  They  offered  to  make 
an  equitable  partition  of  the  countries  north  of  the  Alps  into 
three  portions,  and  Lothair,  when  the  partition  was  made,  was 
to  choose  his  own  share.  He  would,  in  addition,  have  had 
Italy,  which  had  always  been  his  kingdom.  As  the  event 
proved  it  was  no  unfair  offer.  But  now  it  was  Lothair  who 
refused  all  overtures  of  peace.  To  him  it  seemed  that  he 
could  easily  break  the  power  of  his  brothers.  Nevertheless 
he  lengthened  out  the  pourparlers  to  give  time  for  the  arrival 
of  young  Pippin,  who  was  marching  from  Aquitaine.1  And 
negotiations  were  still  proceeding  when  Lothair  heard  of  the 
approach  of  his  ally ;  whereupon  he  suddenly  broke  up  his 
camp  and  fell  a  day's  march  to  the  rear  towards  the  Loire, 
and  thither  his  brothers  followed  him  with  what  speed  they 
might.  They  encamped  at  Tury,2  near  Auxerre.  Truth  to 
tell,  Lewis's  rapid  march  from  the  Rhine  to  Chalons  had 
almost  worn  out  his  infantry. 

The  place  where  the  brothers  finally  found  Lothair  en- 
camped was  in  that  pleasant  undulating  country  just  where 
the  higher  land  of  the  Cote  d'Or  slopes  away  toward  the  great 
central  plain  of  France.  It  is  the  modern  department  of 
Yonne,  a  region  well  shut  in  on  three  sides  by  rivers ;  for  on 
the  north  is  the  Seine,  and  on  the  south  the  Loire ;  on  the 

1  Nithard,    ii  io.  *  4  Tauriacus.'    Ibid. 


THE  BATTLE  OF  FONTENOY.  265 

east  is  the  Yonne,  which  empties  its  waters  into  the  Seine. 
The  country  is  all  divided  up  into  little  valleys,  every  one  of 
which  has  its  own  stream  flowing  to  swell  the  waters  of  one 
or  other  of  the  larger  rivers.  Hence  there  are  a  great 
number  of  places  in  the  neighbourhood  called  Fontaines, 
Fontenoy,  Fontenay,  Fontenailles  :  one  of  which  was  now  to 
gain  its  niche  in  history.  Very  famous  is  this  field  of 
Fontenailles,  or  Fontenoy,1  in  the  annals  of  European  history; 
far  more  so  than  that  modern  battle-place,  the  Fontenoy  in 
Belgium,  where  we  got  our  beating  at  the  hands  of  Marshal 
Saxe.  Upon  the  high  road  between  Cogne  and  Yoigny,  a 
little  after  you  have  passed  Saint  Sauveur,  you  mount  the  hill 
of  Fontaines,  and  there  opposite  you  stands  Fontenoy,  stand- 
ing pleasantly  among  its  woods  and  farms  and  orchards — in 
those  days  no  doubt  its  woods  were  much  thicker  than  they 
are  now.  The  stream  which  runs  through  the  valley,  which 
before  the  summer  sundown  of  the  25th  of  June,  841,  was  to 
run  red  enough,  swells  the  waters  of  the  Ouanne,  a  tributary 
of  the  Yonne. 

Battles  in  those  days,  when  strategy  was  considered  a  sort 
of  knavery,  often  partook  of  the  honourable  character  of  the 
duel.  It  was  more  especially  appropriate  that  this  one  should  do 
so,  because  it  was  fought  between  kinsmen  and  nations  of  the 
same  religion,  the  same  civilization  and  government.  Wherefore 
the  previous  day  Lewis  and  Charles  had  sent  a  solemn  defiance 
to  Lothair ;  and  this  field  of  Fontenoy  had  been  fixed  upon 
as  the  field  of  battle. 

It  was  very  early  on  the  morning  of  the  25th  of  June,  841, 
that  the  two  allied  armies  left  their  positions.  Lewis  and 
Charles  came  from  Tury,  where  their  camp  stood.  They 
took  stand  with  one  wing  upon  the  brow  of  the  hill,  but  with 

1  'Fontaneum.'    Ibid, 


266  CIVIL  WAR. 

the  great  body  of  their  army  in  the  valley.  In  the  latter 
portion  stood  nearly  all  the  troops  of  Charles's  command,  the 
western  Franks,  namely,  from  the  Maas  to  the  Loire,  and  the 
northern  Aquitanians.  Here  the  allied  brothers  made  a  halt 
till  eight  o'clock,  allowing  this  one  more  brief  moment  to 
hopes  of  peace.  But  Lothair  had  no  thoughts  of  peace.  He, 
in  his  turn,  came  advancing  along  the  hill  to  engage  the  troops 
of  Lewis,  while  his  nephew  Pippin  marched  up  the  valley 
against  those  of  Charles.  Now  that  the  time  for  hesitation 
was  over  Lothair  displayed  the  spirit  of  his  ancestors.  '  Had 
there  been  ten  men  as  good  as  he  in  the  united  army'  it  would 
not  have  given  way.  But  the  great  stress  of  battle  lay  between 
Charles  and  Pippin,  more  especially  upon  the  extreme  wing 
of  Charles's  army  which  was  commanded  by  Count  Adal- 
hard.  Here  Frenchmen  and  the  men  of  northern  Aquitaine 
fought  against  the  southern  Aquitanians  and  Gascons.  And 
here  the  slaughter  was  terrible.  The  greater  part  of  the 
nobility  of  Aquitaine  perished  in  this  battle.  Finally,  amid 
the  awful  carnage,  first  Pippin's  army  from  the  valley,  then 
Lothair  and  his  army  from  the  height,  were  pushed  back  and 
back  till  they  broke  and  rolled  away  in  hopeless  flight. 

Lewis  and  Charles  did  not  pursue,  *  wishing  to  spare  Christian 
blood ' ;  perhaps  also  because  their  soldiers  were  too  fatigued 
after  their  midsummer-day's  work.  And  the  two  brothers  spent 
the  next  day,  Sunday,  collecting  the  dead,  singing  their  Te 
Deums  too,  perhaps,  if  they  had  the  heart  to  do  so.  But  it 
was  no  occasion  for  triumph.  On  that  field,  for  the  first  time, 
two  great  armies  drawn  from  the  subjects  of  the  new  Western 
Empire  met  in  civil  combat.  In  Lewis's  troubles  with  his 
sons  there  had  been  no  single  great  engagement.  Christians 
shrank  from  drawing  the  blood  of  Christians,  subjects  of  the 
empire,  the  blood  of  fellow-subjects.  But  here  this  feeling 
was  laid  aside. 


.  PEACE  OF  VERDUN.  267 

No  wonder  then  that  men  looked  back  to  that  day  with  a 
superstitious  horror,  as  to  a  sort  of  foreshadowing  of  Dooms- 
day ;  that  they  told  fabulous  stories  of  the  number  of  the  slain, 
that  they  called  down  curses  on  its  memory  z — 

Maledicta  dies  ilia  nee  in  anni  circulis 

Numeretur,  sed  radatur  ab  omni  memoria. 

Jubar  solis  illi  desit,  aurora  crepusculo. 

This  battle  decided  the  fate  of  the  empire.  For  two  years 
more  Lothair  used  every  endeavour  to  recover  the  ground 
which  he  had  lost,  to  raise  once  more  an  imperial  party  in  the 
state.2  But  in  vain.  Then  followed  (August,  843)  the  treaty 
of  Verdun    between  Lothair,   Lewis,  and   Charles      .  _ 

AD  843 

from  the  date  of  which  the  history  of  mediaeval 
Europe  may  be  said  to  begin.  That  treaty  gave  to  Lothair  in 
north  Europe  the  long  stretch  of  territory  from  the  German 
Ocean  to  the  Alps,  which  afterwards  took  from  his  son  the 
name  of  the  kingdom  of  Lotharingia,  Provence,  and  Bur- 
gundy. Lewis  had  all  the  Christian  lands  eastward — Saxony, 
Thuringia,  Franconia  (East  Francia),  Alamannia,  Bavaria  : 
his  was  the  task  of  guarding  his  frontiers  against  the  endless 
flood  of  Slavonic  barbarians  in  the  East.  Charles  had  France 
proper  from  the  Meuse  to  the  Loire.  Aquitaine,  Gothia  : 
his  to  subdue,  if  he  could,  rebellious  Aquitaine,  and  master 
the  province  of  Gothia,  where,  during  these  years  of  struggle, 
Count  Bernard — the  same  Count  Bernard  of  old  days — had 
been  forming  for  himself  an  independent  power:  his  the  task  of 

1  '  Never  in    our  time   has  there   been  such    a  slaughter    of  Franks 
{Ann.  Fuld.  841). 

2  The  celebrated  'oath  of  Strassburg. '  in  which  Lewis  and  Charles  swore 
fidelity  to  one  another  each  in  the  other's  language,  and  their  soldiers 
followed  suit,  belongs  to  this  period,  and  is  the  earliest  monument  of 
popular  French  and  popular  German  [i.e.,  Deutsch,  which  is  the  people's 
anguage]  which  we  possess  (Nithard,  iii.  5). 


268  CIVIL   WAR. 

making,  if  he  could,  Brittany  once  more  an  integral  portion  of 
his  kingdom.  But  beyond  this  another  work  lay  ahead  for 
Lothair  and  Charles — for  those  two  especially  :  the  task  and 
means  of  guarding  their  sea-coasts  against  the  fleets  of  the 
Northmen,  whom  we  may  be  sure  had  not  watched  with  in- 
difference the  new  troubles  which  were  growing  round  the 
empire  from  day  to  day. 


CHAPTER  IX. 

RAIDS  IN  THE    FRANKISH  EMPIRE. 
AD.  834-845. 


The  outbreak  of  the  civil  war  in  the  Frankish  Empire  which 
lasted  eleven  years  from  Pippin's  first  rising  to  the  battle  of 
Fontenoy,  was  a  signal  of  hope  no  doubt  to  all  the  enemies  of 
the  Franks,  to  all  on  whom  their  rule  pressed  heavily,  or 
who  felt  the  danger  of  their  advance.  In  marshy  Frisia  and 
mountainous  Brittany,  in  the  Gascon  lands  boiJering  the 
Pyrenees,  or  where  Count  Bernard  was  trying  to  raise  himself 
a  separate  state  in  Gothia,  by  the  shores  of  the  Mediterranean 
and  by  the  shores  of  the  Baltic,  the  clang  of  arms  in  that 
fratricidal  conflict  was  as  a  call  to  try  one  more  stroke  for 
independence  or  conquest.  And  not  the  least  was  it  this  to 
the  champions  of  heathendom  who  had  for  many  years  watched 
with  increasing  dread  the  growth  of  the  Carling  Empire.  It 
was  seventy  years  since  Charlemagne's  Franks  first  woke  the 
echoes  in  the  Saxon  forests,  nearly  sixty  since  Widukind  had 
had  to  come  in  and  be  baptized;  and  Siegfred,  his  proti  ctor, 
might  say,  '  Now  my  turn  will  come.'  It  was  thirty  years 
since  the  bolder  Godfred  had  hurled  his  fleet  upon  the  Frisian 
coast  and  gathered  an  army  which  he  designed  should  meet  the 


270  RAIDS  IN  THE  FRANK1SH  EMPIRE. 

hosts  of  Charlemagne.  Now  at  last  the  tide  of  Frankish 
conquest,  which  had  advanced  so  far,  seemed  to  have  fairly 
begun  to  roll  back. 

Amid  the  hurly  of  the  suicidal  war  within  the  empire  all 

anti-Christian  forces  appeared  to  rise  to  fresh  life. 

Who  would  have  dreamed  that  there  still  lay  a 
strong  heathen  party  in  Saxony,  the  land  which  had  been  so 
faithful  to  the  pious  Lewis,  on  which  his  wife  Judith  seemed  to 
have  special  claims  ?  Yet  such  was  the  case.  The  party 
called  itself  the  party  of  the  Stellinga,  or  Sticklers — sticklers  for 
old  observances,  old  methods  of  land  tenure  more  especially.1 
The  Frankish  conquest  had  introduced  Frankish  customs  into 
Saxony,  and  with  them  a  new  territorial  nobility  founded  on  a 
principle  analogous  to  the  mediaeval  one  of  vassalage,  or 
containing,  let  us  say,  the  germ  of  that  principle.  It  was 
principally  of  the  Frankish  system  of  land  tenure  that  the 
feudality  of  the  Middle  Ages  was  the  outgrowth.2  And  the 
introduction  of  that  system  into  Saxony  was  the  destruction,  or 
leastways  the  menace,  of  the  free  allodial  tenure  which  till  then 
obtained.  No  wonder,  therefore,  that  there  was  the  party  of 
Sticklers  who  were  also  the  party  of  the  Frilingi,  or  free- 
holders, and  of  the  peasants  (Jazzi),  opposed  to  the  adel, 
the  Edhelingi  (nobles)  who  held  their  land  on  Frankish 
principles. 

The  adel  were  naturally  favourable  to  the  Frankish  rule,  and 

1  Nithard,  iv.  2  sq.  (Pertz,  ii.  668);  Ann.  Xant.  a.  841  (P.  ii.  227).  It  is 
the  former  of  these  only  who  dwells  much  on  the  fear  of  a  return  to 
heathenism  in  Saxony.  Cf.  Ann.  Bert.  (Prudentius)  a.a.  841  (Pertz,  i. 
437  8)  and  Vita  S.  Lebuini  (P.  ii.  361). 

2  According  to  Fustel  de  Coulange,  in  his  latest  work  V  Alien,  the 
Frankish  land  system,  which  was  eventually  the  feudal,  manorial  system, 
was  inherited  from  the  Romans. 

See  also  Dahn,  Deutsche  Gesch.  ii.  124-5,  on  decay  of  yeoman  class 
among  Germans  under  the  Callings  and  rise  of  nobility  by  service — comites. 
The  same  process  went  on  in  England  after  the  Viking  era. 


HEA  THEN  PARTY  IN  SAXONY.  271 

Lewis  the  German's  hold  upon  Saxony  rested  mainly  upon 
their  support.  This  •  was  reason  enough  to  Lothair — now, 
when  he  was  seeking  to  escape  the  consequences  of  the  defeat 
at  Fontenoy — for  allying  himself  with  the  Stellinga,  the  enemies 
of  his  race  and  of  his  creed.  But  it  gave  a  deep  scandal  to 
Christianity  to  see  the  emperor  himself,  the  head  of  the  whole 
Christian  Commonwealth,  on  terms  with  those  backsliders. 
They  gave  much  trouble  to  Lewis  the  German  in  after-years 
before  they  were  finally  brought  under.1 

It  was  Lothair's  fate  to  enlist  upon  his  side  the  enemies  or 
doubtful  friends  of  Christianity.  He  counted  among  his 
vassals  that  same  Harald  whose  baptism  at  Mainz  fifteen  years 
ago  we  witnessed.  Harald  was  Count  of  Rustringia  and 
Dorstad,  and,  through  his  territorial  possessions,  a  natural 
vassal  of  Lothair.  But  his  Christianity  had  been  growing  of 
late  years  a  more  and  more  doubtful  quantity.  We  see  him  in 
the  army  of  Lothair  engaged  with  others  to  defend  the  passes 
of  the  Rhine  against  Lewis  the  German,  but  doing  so  so  faintly 
that  suspicions  were  entertained  of  his  fidelity.  Nevertheless 
Lothair  trusted  him  and  added  to  his  fiefs  by  granting  him 
the  peninsula  of  Walcheren — it  was  a  peninsula,  not  an  island, 
in  those  days.  'This  gift,'  says  a  contemporary,  '  was  a  deed 
worthy  of  execration  :  whereby  the  persecutors  of  the  Christian 
faith  became  the  masters  of  Christians,  and  the  people  of  Christ 
served  those  who  worshipped  demons.'2 

And  if  in  this  wise  even  within  the  borders  of  the  empire  the 
realm  of  Christendom  seemed  to  be  shrinking,  how  much 
higher  were  the  hopes  and  bolder  the  wishes  of  those  who  had 
never  been  counted  within  it,  and  had  never  yet  bowed  their 
necks  to  the  hateful  dominion  of  the  Franks  !  With  little 
knowledge  as  yet,  but  with  much  fear  and  hate  and  greed,  the 

1  Tulda,  a.  842  (Pertz,  i.  363)  ;  Xant.  I.e.  ;  Bert.  842. 
3  Ann.  Bert.  a.  a.  841  ;  cf.  Nith.  I.e. 


272  RAIDS  IN  THE  FRANKISH  EMPIRE. 

Northmen  of  the  Baltic  began  to  pour  into  the  regions  further 
south,  into  that  unknown  territory  which  to  the  Northmen 
generally  was  simply  'foreign  land'  (Valland)  or  to  many 
was  still  part  of  the  vast  Roman  Empire,  Romariki,  Romberg. 

Only  a  few,  a  very  few  hardy  mariners  had  explored  its 
coasts.  Godfred  had  hurled  his  fleet  against  Friesland. 
There  is  some  sign  of  another  fleet  in  very  early  days 
making  through  the  English  Channel  and  round  as  far  as 
Aquitaine.1  Then  there  was  that  fleet  which  in  Lewis 
the  Pious'  day  first  attacked  Frisia,  afterwards  the  Seine  mouth, 
and  finally  plundered  a  little  town  upon  the  Aquitaine  coast.2 
This  is  all  that  before  the  outbreak  of  the  civil  war  had  been 
attempted  against  Valland  itself. 

Round  the  islands  of  the  North  Sea,  round  Great  Britain  and 
Ireland,  round  the  Orkneys,  the  Shetlands,  the  Hebrides  and 
the  Faroes  there  dwelt  not  the  same  mysterious  dread.  On 
them  the  Viking  fury  had  already  burst.  But  from  the 
Continent  itself  the  wave  had  passed  away.  Here  in  the 
empire  of  Lewis  men  had  too  much  to  think  of  to  turn  their 
eyes  to  far  away  Ireland.  No  doubt  monks  and  priests  began 
to  come  thence  to  France,  and  they  had  stories  to  tell  of  what 
the  furor  Normannorum  was  like.  But  at  home  all  was  yet  safe, 
and  it  is  easy  to  forget  troubles  which  have  never  yet  found  you 
at  home. 

That  one  abortive — or  almost   abortive — attack   (in    820) 

AD  820  on  -^risia,  on  tne  Seine  lands,  and  finally  on  the 
Aquitaine  coast — it  was  a  matter  not  worth  thinking 
of,  nothing  side  by  side  with  the  glorious  conversion  of  Harald 
and  the  interposition  of  the  emperor  in  the  Danish  civil  war. 
And  then  there  were  the  missionary  efforts — Anscar's  famous 
journey  almost  to  the  ends  of  the  earth,  and  the  building  of  a 

*  Ante,  p.  150,  note  x.  fl  P.  233. 


EARL  Y  RAIDS.  273 

church  there  on  Birca  Island.  This  mission  to  Sweden 
had  taken  place,  by  the  way,  in  the  same  year  as  Pippin's  first 
rising.  Since  then  Anscar  had  returned  to  Germany  and  been 
raised  high  among  the  ecclesiastics  in  the  Saxon  coui  try,  first 
as  Bishop  of  Verden,  afterwards  of  Hamburg.  To  him  had 
been  entrusted  the  care  of  all  the  Northern  missions,  to  the 
Danes,  to  the  Swedes,  to  the  Slavs — which  he  held  conjointly 
with  the  famous  Ebbo  of  Rheims.  Now,  in  the  days  when  the 
Franks  were  having  civil  war  in  their  own  country,  the  Danes 
had  ended  theirs.  Out  of  all  their  slaughterings  Horik  had 
survived  as  the  representative  of  Chailemagne's  old  enemy 
Godfred,  and  reig  led  at  Schleswick  no  longer  with  any 
fear  of  the  Franks  upon  his  borders.  And  Danish  ships  no 
doubt  had  already  grown  familiar  with  the  way  to  the  coast  of 
Frisia  and  to  the  mouth  of  the  Rhine,  and  up  the  Rhine  to  the 
rich  Dorstad,  which  was  part  of  Harald's  fief,  where  the  pro- 
duce of  the  looms  of  Flanders  was  spread  out  to  view,  and 
wine  may  be  from  the  vine-lands  higher  up  the  river,  where 
the  proud  churches  invited  men  to  prayer,  and  displayed  their 
costly  shrines  inviting  to  other  thoughts  as  well. 

To  the  market-places  of  Dorstad,  or  along  the  banks  of  the 
Rhine  spread  the  news  of  the  rising  of  one  part  of  the  empire 
against  another  part,  of  the  sons  against  their  father,  finally 
of  the  shame  of  Liigenfeld,  where  died  the  faith  of  many  a 
Frank. 

It  was  one  year   after   Liigenfeld,  in  the  early  autumn  of 
834,  that  men  beheld  a  fleet  of  Viking  ships — not 
Danish    merchants   these — which  steered  for   the 
country  of  the  Rhine  mouths.     They  came  up  one  branch  to 
Utrecht,  Willibrord's  old  see,  and  this  they  plundered,  and  up 
another  branch  to  Dorstad,  which  they  plundered    likewise.1 

1  Ann.   Xant.  a.a.    834    (Pertz,    ii.   226)  ;   Ann.    Fuldenses,    a.a.  835 
(Pertz,  i.  360) ;  Ann.  Bert.  a.a.  834  (Pertz,  i.  428). 

19 


274  RAIDS  IN  THE  FRANK 'IS H  EMPIRE. 

Dorstad,  as  we  know,  was  Harald's  town,  and  Harald  was  still 
a  vassal  of  the  empire,  and  professedly  a  Christian  :  wherefore 
we  might  call  this  expedition  the  last  wave  of  the  Danish  civil 
war,  or  the  first  of  Viking  invasion.  We  cannot  tell  whether 
it  was  directed  most  against  the  empire  or  against  Harald  the 
rival  of  King  Horik.  But  the  Christians  were  the  sufferers  in 
any  case.  '  From  this  time  the  empire  weakened  and  the 
misery  of  the  people  increased  from  day  to  day.' 

The  next  year,  and  the  next,  and  the  next,  the  pirates  revisited 
the    same    tetritories,     plundering    and    burning, 

A.D.  835-6-7.  .  r,  ,  j  i"  ■        -*u 

carrying  ofl  men  and  women,  and  making  the 
Frisians  pay  them  tribute.1  They  came  up  the  Scheld  to 
Antwerp  and  burnt  that  town  as  they  had  burned  Dorstad.  The 
heavens  sent  dreadful  warnings  like  to  those  fiery  shapes  which 
had  foretold  the  first  onset  of  the  Vikings  in  Northumbria  forty 
years  ago.  At  last  the  cry  of  the  people  brought  Lewis  to  the 
north.  He  had  been  preparing  to  make  an  expedition  into 
Italy  to  depose  Lothair — as  we  saw.  He  had  to  give  up  this 
intention,  to  march  up  to  Nymuegen,  and  drive  the  Northmen 
for  a  moment  from  the  prey  on  which  they  were  fastening.  He 
saw  the  red  fires  of  their  ravages ;  but  they  did  not  stay  his 
approach.  All  he  could  do  was  to  hold  a  council  at  Nymuegen 
and  consult  about  the  means  for  defending  these  territories. 

Neither  Lewis  and  his  Franks  upon  the  one  side,  nor  the 
Northmen  themselves  upon  the  other,  knew  the  dreadful  pro- 
phecy contained  in  these  early  raids.  They  could  not  see  all 
that  lay  in  the  womb  of  Fate.  England,  as  I  surmise,  had  as 
yet  been  attacked  only  by  Vikings  from  Ireland,  whose  opera- 
tions lay  outside  the  sphere  of  Continental  politics.   [I  surmise 

1  Ann.  Xant.  835-6-7  ;  Ann.  Fuld.  835-839  ;  Ann.  Bert.  834  (Pru- 
dentius),  836,  838.  The  people  of  Cologne  were  so  incensed  at  the  report 
of  these  outrages  that,  in  836,  they  massacred  some  envoys  of  Horik,  the 
king  of  Jutland,  who  happened  to  be  in  the  city  ;  Ann.  Colon.  (P.  i.  97). 
Munch  misdates  this  event  in  S30,  N.  F.  H.  v..  395.     See  next  note. 


ATTACKS  ON  DORSTAD  AND  NOIRMOUTIERS.   275 

that  the  attacks  on  this  country  up  to  the  battle  of  Heng- 
stone,  in  838,  or  perhaps  a  year  or  two  later,  came  from 
Ireland.] 

Nevertheless,  in  834,  what  is  this  that  men  descry  off  the 
island  of  Herio,  or  Noirmoutiers,  just  south  of  the  mouth  of  the 
Loire  ?  Noirmoutiers  was  an  island  or  a  peninsula  just  like 
Lindisfarne,  not  less  suited  than  it  had  been  to  form  the  point 
d'appui  for  Norman  attacks  upon  the  mainland.  Like 
Lindisfarne  it  was  connected  with  the  coast  by  a  tongue  of 
land  which  was  covered  and  laid  bare  twice  daily.  It  had 
its  abbey,  not  so  famous,  indeed,  as  the  English  one,  but 
rich  and  prosperous.  Thither  was  Wala  banished,  after  the 
suppression  of  Pippin's  first  rising  against  Lewis  the  Pious. 
Wala  was  banished  to  Noirmoutiers  in  831.  In  834,  through 
fear  of  Norman  onset — some  fleet  it  must  be  supposed  de- 
scried out  at  sea — the  monks  of  Noirmoutiers  got  leave  to 
dig  up  the  remains  of  their  founder,  St.  Philibert,  and  transport 
them  inland.  Next  year  the  fleet  wTas  there  again,  and,  strange  to 
say,  it  was  upon  St.  Philibert's  day,  August  20,  835, 
that  an  engagement  took  place  between  this  fresh 
crew  of  Vikings  on  the  one  side  and  the  warden  of  the  coast 
at  this  point,  Count  Rainald  of  Herbauge.1  In  this  firs 
recorded  battle  against  the  Danes  upon  the  coast  of  France 
the  Count  was  defeated;  thereupon  Noirmoutier  monastery 
was  plundered  and  many  of  the  monks  were  slain.2  This 
was  the  only  Viking  expedition  which  in  the  latter  years 
of  Lewis  the  Pious's  reign  passed  beyond  the  English 
Channel. 

Meantime  the  Danes  had  been  growing  at  home  in  Frisia 

x  Ademar,  Chron.  Aquit.  830-1  (P.  ii.  252),  Ermentarius,  Trans.  S.  Ph. 
Munch  (0.  c.  ii.  419)  has  followed  the  date,  830,  of  these  two  last  authori- 
ties ;  but  it  is  incorrect.  Cf.  Diimmler,  Ostfr.  Geschichte,  i.  188,  and 
Steenstrup,  Normanmriu,  ii.  38. 

2  Ermentarius,  however,  /.  c,  speaks  of  it  as  a  Christian  victory. 


276  RAIDS  IN  THE  FRANKISH  EMPIRE. 

and,  may  we  not  believe,  learning  to  improve  their 

art    of    navigation    under  the   inspiration   of   the 

Frisian  merchants  and  mariners,  who  had  long  been  acquainted 

with  the  perils  of  the  North  Sea.     And  it  was,  maybe,  due  to 

such  improvement  that  we  find  them,  in  840  and 
A.D.  840  (?)     .       ,  „      .  .  .      :, 

the  following  year  crossing  over  to  the  opposite 

coast  of  England,  to  the  'marsh  country,' as  the  chronicle 
says,1  that  is  to  say  to  the  south  of  Lincoln  or  the  north  of 
East  Anglia.  They  slipped  up  the  Wash  and  made  their  way 
into  the  great  inland  lagoons  which  lay  between  East  Anglia 
and  Mercia.  Here  they  slew  Ealdorman  Hereberht.  They 
ravaged  in  Lindsay  and  in  East  Anglia  and  southwards  in  the 
coast  of  Kent.2  A  wholly  new  experience  for  the  Danes  if,  as 
is  possible,  this  was  the  first  expedition  which  came  hither  from 
the  East — the  first  expedition,  that  is  to  say,  since  those  very 
early  ones  which  took  place  before  the  ninth  century  began. 
Those  who  came  southward  found  Egberht  no  longer  govern- 
ing the  kingdoms  of  Wessex  and  Kent,  but  his  son  Ethelwulf, 
who  succeeded  in  838  or  839,  a  prince  whom  historians  have 
been  wont  to  speak  of  as  a  weak  king  succeeding  a  famous  sire, 
much  what  Lewis  the  Pious  was  compared  with  his  father, 
Charlemagne.  There  is  perhaps  little  ground  for  this  inference.3 
Still  one  cannot  but  feel  that  some  of  the  events  of  Ethel  wulf's 
reign  which  brought  grave  dangers  upon  England  would  not 
have  happened  under  Egberht.* 

In  Valland  (France),  meantime,  Lewis  himself  had  died  ; 
and  the  full  fury  of  civil  war  had  burst  forth.  And  when  the 
rumour  thereof  spread  to  the  north,  the  Vikings  prepared  for 

1  AS.  C.  837,  838.  This  is  the  second  recorded  invasion  of  England 
in  this  century,  that  preceding  Hengstone  (a.d.  838)  being  the  first. 

According  to  Theopold  {Ktitische  Untersuchung  iiber  die  Quellen  der  AS. 
Gesch.),  Chr.  837  =  840,  838  =  841. 

2  AS.  Chron.  ibid.  3  Green,  Conq.  of  Eng/and,  pp.  73-4. 
*  Below,  Chapter  XII. 


OSCAR'S  FLEET  IN  THE  SEINE.  277 

new  and  bolder  expeditions.  A  fleet  of  unusual  dimensions 
was  fitted  out,  and  Oscar,1  a  leader  of  enterprise  and  fame, 
took  command  of  that  fleet,  which  was  destined  to  accomplish 
great  things.  Now  do  the  names  of  the  leaders  of  these 
expeditions  begin  to  appear  in  the  Christian  chronicles. 

In  the  early  year  of  841  there  were  heavy  rains  in  France, 
and  the  waters  of  many  of  the  rivers  were  full  to 
overflowing.  And  let  it  be  said  that  in  those 
days  all  the  rivers  were  fuller  than  they  are  now.  The  thick 
woods  which  covered  the  soil  of  France,  so  bare  to-day,  would 
ensure  a  heavy  rainfall  and  full  streams.  But  this  spring  they 
— the  Seine,  for  instance — were  unusually  full.  Charles  the 
Bald  found  his  account  therein  :  for  he  had  been  waiting  for  a 
chance  to  cross  the  river  behind  which  Lothair  had  lately 
driven  him,  and  then  set  a  guard  to  protect  the  stream.  But 
Charles  gathered  boats  and  set  himself  across  near  Rouen, 
to  the  surprise  and  confusion  of  Lothair's  guards,  and  made  his 
way  eastward,  with  the  intention  of  joining  forces  with  Lewis 
the  German,  as  we  have  already  seen.  As  the  king,  having 
got  thus  happily  across,  was  on  his  way  towards  the  Maas,  a 
Viking  fleet,  probably  Oscar's,  came  to  the  mouth  of  the  same 
river  Seine,  and,  finding  it  open  and  easy  of  navigation,  sailed 
up.2  The  region  was  all  new  to  them.  There  might  they  see 
the  river  in  its  blue  eddies,  bathing  the  fair  flowers  which  grew 
upon  its  banks,  or,  should  the  moon  have  brought  round  a 
spring  tide,  they  might  hear  that  roar  of  the  ceger  on  which 
their  own  offspring  bestowed  this  name  in  memory  of  the  old 
Norse  sea-god.3 

1  More  correctly  Asgeirr.     Storm,  Bidragy  &c,  p.  62. 

2  Ann.  Bert.  a.  a. 

3  /Egir.  Qua  Sequana  ccEruleo  gurgite  perspicuisque  atrsibus  flluens, 
odoriferasque  riparum  herbas  lambens,  Jiuctuque  infiatiore  ma*'is  scepe 
reverberata  secundum  discrimina  hinie  inundantis  maris  pelago  se  immittit. 
One  of  the  few  passages  in  Dudo  not  devoid  of  a  certain  charm. 


278  RAIDS  IN  THE  FRANKISH  EMPIRE. 

The  Vikings  sailed  along  until  they  came  to  where  the  rock- 
built  Rouen  guarded  the  river.  It  was  built  not  upon  the 
shores,  but  upon  the  islands  (mere  rocks)  in  the  mid-stream ; 
a  safe  place  if  there  had  been  none  but  land  forces  to  be 
feared,  but  above  all  others  exposed  now  to  the  Danish  fleets. 
The  Vikings  stormed  the  town,  plundered  it,  and  burned  a 
great  portion.  St.  Ouen  Abbey,  hard  by,  shared  the  same  fate. 
Then  down  the  stream  again  to  Jumieges  (another  abbey), 
which  only  saved  itself  by  payment  of  a  fine.  The  news  of 
the  onset  came  to  the  ears  of  Charles,  who,  as  we  saw,  was 
bent  eastwards  on  his  way  to  a  junction  with  Lewis ;  but  for 
the  nonce  he  turned  back,  and  the  Vikings,  to  whom  a 
Frankish  king  was  still  an  object  of  terror,  put  out  again  to 

sea.1 

Now  that  the  lands  beyond  the  Channel  had  been  once  ex- 
plored there  were  not  wanting  adventurers  to  keep  the  way 
open.  On  one  side  were  the  rich  towns  of  Neustria,  Rouen 
for  example,  or— a  little  to  the  north — Quentovic  (Canche-wick) 
at  the  mouth  of  the  Canche,  one  of  the  chief  trading  cities  of 
Northern  Europe  in  those  days,  a  rival  to  Dorstad.  On  the 
other  side  were  the  English  towns — London,  Rochester, 
Canterbury.  We  read  of  a  fleet  in  842 — it  may 
have  been  Oscar's — falling  first  upon  London ; 
then  crossing  the  Channel  to  Quentovic,  where  it  arrived 
just  at  daybreak.  Here  was  a  new  experience  for  one  of  the 
prosperous  cities  and  abbeys  of  Neustria — an  experience  which 
foretold  many  like  it.  It  was  one  thing  to  hear  stories  of 
raids  on  distant  Frisia,  another  thing  to  have  the  pirate  knocking 
at  one's  own  doors  after  this  fashion.  What  an  experience  was 
that  of  the  people  of  Quentovic,  for  instance,  when  the  pirate 
fleet  was  found  at  daybreak 2  to  have  sailed  into  the  mouth  of 

1  Normannerne,  ii.  49- 5°- 

a  Ann.  Bert.  s.a.  ;  Nithard,  iv.  3  (P.  ii.  669). 


REBELLIOUS  VASSALS.  279 

the  Canche,  and  to  be  anchored  at  their  very  gates.  What  a 
hurrying  on  of  clothes  and  collecting  all  the  ready  money 
possible  for  a  ransom,  by  which  the  Danes  were  induced  to  sail 
away.  The  Vikings  were  new  to  their  work  as  yet.  In  after- 
years  they  would  have  laughed  at  the  bribes  which  contented 
them  now.  From  Quentovic  the  fleet  sailed  back  again  to 
Rochester,  which  was  likewise  plundered  or  compelled  to  pay 
a  fine.1 

One  likes  to  linger  over  these  early  attacks,  so  adventurous 
were  they — such  an  exploring  of  a  new  world  by  the  Northmen, 
comparable  to  any  Cook's  voyages,  or  to  the  achievements  of 
any  Elizabethan  buccaneers  upon  the  Spanish  seas. 

Presently  domestic  treachery,  which  was  rife  enough  in  the 
kingdom  of  Charles,  began  to  beckon  to  these  new  allies. 
Hitherto  all  had  been  vague  and  tentative  in  the  Viking  raids. 
We  saw  how,  as  early  as  835,  they  had  attacked 
Noirmoutiers.  But  they  had  not  yet  made  any 
footing  there.  Now  domestic  treason  called  them  thither  again. 
Now  could  they  take  a  leaf  out  of  the  same  book  that  their 
brother  Vikings  in  Ireland  had  read,  and  find  out  friends 
within  the  lands  they  visited.  So  soon  as  the  civil  war  was 
ended  began  for  all  the  rulers  of  the  Carling  Empire  the  task 
of  subduing  their  own  rebellious  vassals  or  rebellious  tributaries 
— for  Lewis  the  German,  his  Slavs ;  for  Lothair,  the  Danes  in 
Frisia  ;  for  Charles,  first  of  all,  the  Bretons  in  Armorica.  And 
there  was  another  use  to  be  made  of  some  of  these  difficult 

1  AS.  Chron.  839.  There  can  be  no  sort  of  doubt  that  Quentovic  is  the 
place  meant  by  the  entry  in  the  English  Chronicle,  s.  a.  839.  MSS.  A,  B, 
have  Cwantawic  clearly  enough.  Later  copyists  (after  Quentovic  had  sunk 
into  insignificance)  have  thought  that  Canterbury  was  meant ;  so  we  have 
Cantwarabyrig  (C)  ;  D,  E,  Cantwic  ;  Otho,  B.  xi.  has  Cantwarum.  The 
comparison  with  Ann.  Bert,  shows  the  Chronicle  to  be  three  years  be- 
hind the  right  date.  The  fight  mentioned  as  taking  place  at  Charmouth  in 
a.d.  840  {AS.  Ch.)  is  probably  only  a  repetition  of  the  entry  under  833. 
See  Seenstrup,  /.  c. 


280  RAIDS  IN  THE  PRANKISH  EMPIRE. 

subjects  ',  if  they  could  not  be  made  obedient  to  their  lord 
they  might  at  least  be  encouraged  to  atiack  his  enemies. 
Lothair,  it  is  believed,  had  already  begun  to  bethink  him  of 
this  way  of  revenging  the  humiliation  of  Fontenoy z ;  of  sending 
the  Danish  settlers  within  his  own  borders  to  harry  the  kingdom 
of  Charles  ;  and  the  same  methods  were  put  in  practice  by 
Charles's  enemies  nearer  home.  One  of  the  most  formidable 
of  these  was  Lantbert,  a  count  who  had  already  distinguished 
himself  fighting  on  the  side  of  Lothair.  His  office  was  that 
which  Roland  once  held — Count  of  the  Breton  marshes.  But 
the  part  he  played  was  that  of  the  traitor  Ganelon,  not  Roland's. 
He  leagued  himself  with  the  duke  or  prince  of  Brittany, 
Nominoi.2  Nominoi  despatched  an  army  against  the  new 
warden  of  the  Marches,  Rainald  (Reginold) — the  same  who 
fought  with  the  Danes  at  Noirmoutiers  in  835.  The  Breton 
army  was  under  the  command  of  Erispoi,  the  heir-apparent 
of  Brittany.  It  was  decisively  defeated  by  RainaJd.  But 
Lantbert  came  up  unperceived  and  caught  the  Frankish  army 
unawares,  and  in  the  engagement  which  followed  Rainald  was 
slain  and  his  troops  defeated.  Lantbert  stirred  up  Nominoi 
to  throw  off  all  allegiance  to  Charles. 

And  now  the  rebels  descried  a  Viking  fleet — Oscar's  we  may 
assume — which  was  cruising  near  the  mouth  of  the  Loire ;  they 
a  'opted  the  shameful  expedient  of  inviting  writhin  their  borders 
these  enemies  of  the  Christian  name.  The  allies  proceeded  to 
lay  siege  to  Nantes,  the  chief  town  of  Rainald's  county.^ 
When  the  Bretons  had  long  invested  it  upon  the  land  side,*  the 
Viking  fleet  sailed  up  the  Loire  and  attacked  it,  all  defenceless, 
from  the  river.  The  Vikings  entered  the  town  burning  and 
slaying.      It  was  on  St.  John's  day.     In  the  cathedral  they 

1  Peace  had  not  yet  been  established  by  the  Treaty  of  Verdun. 

*  Or  Nomenoe.  3  He  is  sometimes  called  Count  of  Nantes. 

4  Ann.  Bert.  a.  843. 


PLUNDER  OF  NANTES.  281 

found  the  Bishop Gunhard  celebrating  mass;  and  as  he  uttered 

the  words  siirsam  corda  the  Viking  swords  struck  him  down. 

He  and  all  the  congregation  were  slain.     An  awful  midsummer 

festival  for  Nantes.1     After  many  other  plunderings  the  Vikings 

took  hold,  for  the  first  time,  of  Noirmoutiers,  which  was  to 

become  their  great  arsenal  in  the  future,  the  storehouse  for 

all  the  treasure  plundered  from  the  villas  and  monasteries  of 

the  Loire.     There  they  abode  the  winter,  and  this  we  may 

take  to  be  the  first  wintering  of  the  Vikings  on  the  soil  of 

France.2 

Far  to  the  south  Charles  had  other  troubles,  where  Bernard, 

the  Count  of  Gothia  (he  whom  men  once  said  was 

A.D.  844. 
.the  father  of   Charles  the  Bald),  had   long  been 

trying  to  raise  himself  into  an  independent  ruler.  He  had 
never  done  personal  homage  to  his  new  king,  though  he  had 
deputed  his  son  William  to  do  homage  for  him ;  and  he  had 
taken  no  part  on  one  side  or  the  other  at  the  battle  of  Fontenoy. 
Charles  answered  this  insubordination  by  treachery.3  He 
succeeded  in  inducing  the  count  to  visit  his  camp  before 
Toulouse.  When  there,  Bernard  was  seized,  tried,  and  be- 
headed. But  his  rebellion  was  not  so  easily  subdued.  William, 
his  son,  a  mere  boy,  still  held  out  in  Toulouse — that  fateful 
city  destined  to  be  the  focus  of  so  many  rebellions  in  after- 
years.  Here  young  Count  William  was  joined  by  another 
boy  leader,  young  Pippin,  the  head  of  the  insurgent  party  in 
Southern  Aquitaine.  And  presently  these  two  gained  a  very 
important  victory  over  a  large  body  of  Charles's  troops,  under 
one  of  his  ablest  generals — his  uncle  Hugh,  lay-abbot  of  St. 
Quentin  and  of  St.  Bertin ;  in  the  battle  Hugh  fell/     Pippin 

1  Chron.  Font  an.  843  (P.  ii.  302),  Regino,  853  !  (Regino's  dates  are  wholly 
wrong  at  this  point.  He  says,  too,  on  Easter  Sunday).  Dummler,  0.  c.  i. 
190. 

2  Ann.  Bert.  843,  '  insulam  quamchm  ' — Noirmoutiers.      Chr.  Aq.  846. 

3  Ann.  Fuld.  a. a.  S44.  *  Ann.  Bert.  a.  844. 


282  RAIDS  IN  THE  PRANKISH  EMPIRE. 

and  William  now  turned  to  the  same  expedient  which  Nominoi" 
and  Lantbert  had  adopted.  They  called  in  a  Viking  fleet — ■ 
still  Oscar's  most  probably — which  sailed  up  the  Garonne  to 
Toulouse.  We  do  not  know  how  far  it  aided  the  rebels  in 
their  resistance  to  Charles.  But  for  the  Vikings  themselves 
this  was  a  new  and  rare  experience — a  visit  to  the  rich  vine- 
lands  of  Southern  France.  And  having  got  so  far  they 
ventured  even  further,  and  made  a  foray  upon  the  northern 
coast  of  Spain,  not  (first)  upon  Arabic  Spain,  but  upon  the 
little  independent  Christian  kingdom  in  the  north-west — the 
last  remains  of  the  once  mighty  power  of  the  Visigoths. 

The  little  kingdom  of  Asturias,  rocky  and  bare,  edged  in 
between  the  sea,  the  Pyrenees,  and  the  Arab  Emirate  in  the 
south,  hardly  seemed — so  small  and  insignificant  it  was — to 
have  any  part  in  the  history  of  Europe.  Its  chronicles  at  this 
time  consist  of  little  more  than  dynastic  lists.  But  its  destinies 
were  great.  It  was  the  germ  out  of  which  the  better  known 
kingdom  of  Leon  was  to  grow  :  as  out  of  the  kingdom  of  Leon 
was  to  grow  the  monarchy  of  Spain.  Small  as  it  was,  this 
rock-bound  kingdom  did  not  escape  the  notice  of  the  Vikings ; 
and  it  has,  among  Christian  states,  the  unique  honour  of  being 
one  upon  which  their  attacks  were  uniformly  unsuccessful. 
The  Vikings,  with  a  fleet  of  150  sail,  began  ravaging  the 
country  around  Corunna  (Porum  Brigantium).  Ramiro  I.  was 
the  king  who  at  this  moment  sat  upon  the  Asturian  throne. 
He  collected  an  army,  gave  battle  to  the  Vikings,  gained  a 
bloody  victory,  and  burnt  no  less  than  seventy  of  the  enemy's 
fleet :  whereat  the  raiders  withdrew  from  his  kingdom. 

The  pirates  now  coasted  round  the  north  of  Portugal 
and  on  to  Lisbon.  They  were  now  off  the  Arab  coasts,  face 
to  face  with  a  new  foe.1     On  shore  they  would  now  have  to 

1  Fabricius,  Forbindelserne  mellem  Norden  og  den  Sp.  Halv'6.  pp.  30-57  ; 
Gayangos,  Moham?n.  dyn.  in  Spain  ;  Dozy,  Recherches,  &c,  ii.  27}  sqq. 


ATTACKS  ON  SPANISH  PENINSULA.  283 

encounter,  not  a  militia  which  was  the  best  the  Christian  lands 
could  produce,  not  a  fyrd  nor  a  ban  and  arriere  ban,  but  a 
regular  standing  army.  But  more  than  that,  the  Vikings  would 
also  find  a  navy.  El-Hakim  had  created  this  navy  some  thirty 
years  ago,  and  it  was  now  under  the  command  of  no  less  a 
ruler  than  the  brave  and  accomplished  Abd-Er-Rahman  II. 
The  adventurers  would  find,  too,  men  trained  in  piracies  like 
their  own.  They  would  find  not  only  ships  which  had  been 
stationed  to  keep  guard  along  all  the  Spanish  coasts,  but 
adventurous  fleets  which  had  made  attacks  upon  the  Italian  and 
Provencal  towns,  and  which  had  ere  now  made  a  lodgment 
{their  Noirmoutiers)  at  the  mouth  of  the  Rhone — on  the  flat 
alluvial  island  of  Camargue.  Yet  the  Vikings,  in  the  delight 
of  this  new  adventure  of  theirs,  seemed  loath  to  turn  back. 
For  with  all  these  dangers  they  found,  too,  a  land  rich  as  no 
Christian  land  was  rich,  gorgeous  with  mosques  and  schools, 
the  best  in  Europe,  with  canals,  roads,  the  warehouses  of 
merchants — a  booty  abundantly  tempting  if  they  could  get 
near  it.  So  they  sailed  on.  At  Lisbon  a  fleet  of  Arab  ships 
lay  in  wait  for  them  and  drove  them  off  with  loss ;  but  they 
continued  their  voyage  to  the  south  of  the  peninsula,  to  Cadiz,  to 
Medina  Sidonia,  and  then  back  up  the  Guadalquivir  to  Seville 
(September  25th).  All  these  places  they  plundered.  Abd-Er- 
Rahman  finally  sent  a  detachment  of  troops  against  them. 
The  Vikings  were  at  first  successful  (September  29th  and 
October  1st) ;  afterwards  the  Arabs  were  reinforced  and  gained 
the  victory  (November  17th),  burning  many  of  the  Viking 
ships.  This  really  put  an  end  to  the  hopes  of  the  Northmen  ; 
though  in  revenge  they  made  one  or  two  more  descents  upon 
places  on  the  coast  of  Portugal.  Eventually  they  put  out  to 
sea  and  were  heard  of  no  more. 

How    wide  now   had    grown    the   theatre   of    the  Vikings' 
ravages.     In   the  far   north    we   may   feel  sure   that   by   this 


284  RAIDS  IN  THE  FRANKlSH  EMPIRE. 

840-5  t'me  ^y  ^ad  a^rea<^y  taken  firm  footing,  in  the 
Shetlands,  in  the  Orkneys,  in  the  greater  part 
of  Caithness,  in  the  Hebrides.  These  were  their  fixed 
stations  whence  they  swooped  down  upon  the  lowlands, 
upon  Northumbria,  or  upon  Ireland.  In  Ireland  they  were 
under  Thorgils  seated  in  the  northern  portion — in  Conn's 
Half — and  had  beside  lesser  stations  all  round  the  coast.  In 
England,  on  the  Wessex  coast,  they  had  as  yet  only  made 
attacks.  But  they  had  gone  so  far  as  to  ravage  the  chief  towns 
of  Kent,  and  had  once  plundered  London ;  on  the  east  coast 
and  in  the  inner  marshlands  they  had  also  been  seen.  Half 
Frisia  was  theirs,  what  with  the  settlements  of  quasi-Christian 
Northmen  in  Rustringia  and  in  Walcheren,  and  the  constant 
preparedness  of  the  Vikings  to  descend  upon  any  of  the  rich 
cities  which  stood  along  the  river  banks  in  that  region.  Of 
late  the  pirates  had  been  seen  upon  most  of  the  great  rivers  of 
France — the  Seine,  the  Loire,  the  Garonne ;  and  now  their 
destroying  sails  had  shown  themselves,  and  they  had  plundered 
along  all  the  coasts  of  Spain,  Christian  and  Mahommedan,  as 
far  as  to  the  Pillars  of  Hercules. 

II. 

The  winter  which  preceded  845  was  a  season  of  unusual 
severity,1  cold  north  winds  lasting  long  into  the 
spring,  withering  the  young  vine-shoots  and  arresting 
the  growth  of  corn.  So  that  something  like  a  regular  famine 
set  in.  There  were  earthquakes  too,  and  divers  heavenly 
signs,  perplexing  to  the  nations.2  And  what  was  observed  with 
superstition,  as  also  a  sign  from  heaven,  the  wolves  (emblems 
of  the  northern  wolves  who  are   about   to  sweep  upon   us) 

1  Ann.  Bert.  845. 

2  Two  earthquakes  in  this  year.  Ann.  Xant.  845. 


ATTACK  ON  HAMBURG.  285 

became  in  these  seasons  through  scarcity  and  through  cold 
extraordinarily  numerous  and  fierce.  They  assembled  in  great 
cohorts,  marching  and  manoeuvring  like  an  army  (so  the 
chroniclers  would  have  us  believe),  and  attacking  with  'fatal 
results  small  towns  and  villages.  Surely  the  Day  of  the  Lord 
was  at  hand. 

It  was  now  fifty  years  since  the  ravage  of  Lindisfarne,  the 
real  beginning  of  the  Viking  Fury — almost  half  the  Viking  Age 
had  passed  by.  In  the  far  west  it  was  a  crisis  in  which  one 
phase  of  Viking  conquest  came  to  an  end  by  the  drowning  of 
Turgesius  in  Loch  Owel.  In  the  most  eastern  parts  of  the 
Vikings'  theatre  of  war  it  was  the  time  for  a  new  beginning  of 
cmite  another  sort.  The  year  845  was  the  year  of  two  great 
efforts  on  the  part  of  the  Vikings — one  against  Germany,  the 
first  great  attack  against  any  part  of  Lewis's  realm  ;  the  other  an 
attack  upon  the  rising  capital  of  Charles's  kingdom — the  city  of 
Paris. 

It  is  almost  a  wonder  that  the  Danes  were  not  earlier 
attracted  by  the  wide  mouth  of  the  Elbe  on  which  lay,  so  con- 
veniently near  the  sea,  the  rich  and  growing  town  of  Hamburg, 
Hamburg  was  not  as  yet  at  all  comparable  to  Dorstad  as  a  centre 
of  trade.  But  longo  intervallo  it  stood  probably  next  to  it  among 
the  northern  cities  which  had  an  outlet  to  the  German  Ocean. 
It  had  not  long  since  (831)  been  erected  into  an  Archbishopric, 
and  the  travel-worn  Anscar,  who  had  lately  returned  from  his 
first  expedition  into  Sweden,  was  made  its  archbishop.  In  the 
spring  of  845  a  fleet  of  no  less  than  six  hundred  sail ■ — the 
largest  Viking  fleet  yet  on  record — suddenly  appeared  in  sight 
off  Hamburg.     It  had  been  despatched  by  Horik,  the  Danish 

1  Ann.  Bert.  846  ;  Ann.  Xant.  6  ;  Ann.  Fuld.  8^5.  Ann.  Xant.  say 
that  the  Frisians  defeated  the  Vikings  more  than  once  this  year,  with  the 
loss  of  twelve  thousand  men  (!);  Ann.  Field,  say  the  Vikings  fought 
three  battles  against  the  Frisians,  that  they  were  beaten  in  the  first  and 
victorious  in  the  other  two. 


286  RAIDS  IN  THE  FRANKISH  EMPIRE. 

king,  himself;  though  Horik  was  nominally  at  peace  with  Lewis 
the  German.  There  was  no  time  for  the  Hamburgers  to  send 
for  troops  or  to  prepare  for  resistance.  Anscar  had  to  fly — 
bearing  his  relics — and  wandered  awhile  disconsolately  among 
the  woods  of  Saxony.  The  Vikings,  who  had  forced  an  entry 
into  the  city  within  twenty-four  hours  of  their  first  appearance 
before  the  walls,  abode  there  a  night  and  a  day,  killed  many  of 
the  citizens,  burned  the  church  and  monastery,  and  then  sailed 
back  down  the  Elbe.  Anscar  returned  to  lament  over  the  ruins 
of  his  beloved  church  and  city,  but  with  a  chastened  and 
decorous  sorrow.  *  The  Lord  gave  and  the  Lord  hath  taken 
away.' x 

This  same  year  another  fleet  was  fitted  out  in  Denmark. 
The  captain  of  it  was,  it  is  thought,  that  famous  legendary 
Viking  hero,  Ragnar  Lodbrok.  For  some  reason,  which  we 
cannot  now  fathom,  Ragnar  has  remained  in  Norse  tradition 
the  representative  of  the  Viking  hero.  But  before  the  legends 
of  Ragnar  Lodbrok  grew  up  in  the  north,  the  Viking  Age  had 
changed  its  character.  The  idea  of  the  Viking  life  no  longer 
represented  a  great  combat  between  heathendom  and  Christen- 
dom ;  far  more  a  desultory  warfare  carried  on  by  one  nation  of 
Scandinavians  against  another,  or  by  the  outlaws  of  some 
Scandinavian  state  against  the  party  in  power.  Consequently 
the  stories  of  Ragnar's  life  present  no  authentic  features  dating 
from  the  time  with  which  we  are  concerned,  and  bear  little  or 
nothing  of  the  character  of  the  adventures  of  this  age. 

In  the  civil  war  in  Denmark,  whose  outbreak  just  preceded 
the  death  of  Charlemagne,  we  have  seen  how  a  certain  Anulo, 
fighting  against  his  cousin  Siegfred,  fell,  along  with  his  rival,  in 
a  great  battle ;  and  how  his  brother  and  representative,  Harald, 
was  chosen  king.     Some  writers  would  see  in  the  word  Anulo 

1  Vita  Anscari,  c.  16  (Pertz,  ii.  700).  This  taking  of  Hamburg  is 
wrongly  ascribed  by  Lappeuberg  to  the  year  840. 


RAGNAR  LODBROK.  287 

(Annulo — Annulus)  only  a  Latinization  of  the  Norse  name  Ring, 
which  is  that  of  the  father  of  Ragnar  Lodbrok.1  And  if  this 
view  were  accepted  we  should  have  Ragnar  standing  in  rather 
the  ideal  position  of  the  Viking  leader,  close  to  the  throne  yet 
with  no  acknowledged  claim  to  succession — a  person  whom 
both  the  rival  parties  in  the  kingdom  would  have  had  an 
interest  in  pressing  to  leave  it.  For  when  Harald's  party  fell, 
and  Horik  came  to  the  throne  of  South  Denmark,  Harald's 
nephew  had  no  better  prospect  of  succession  than  before. 

This  is  a  possible  explanation  of  Ragnar's  pre-eminence  in 
Norse  tradition.  He  may  have  been  one  of  the  first  of  the 
royal  stock  who  devoted  himself  wholly  to  the  Viking  life.  In 
those  early  Viking  days,  when  Horik  mounted  the  throne — not 
yet  five-and-twenty  years  since  the  first  Viking  expedition 
worthy  of  the  name — no  leader  of  royal  blood  had,  perhaps, 
taken  part  in  these  far  voyages.  Danish  kings  had  fitted  out 
fleets,  as  Godfred  had  done,  as  Horik  was  to  do,  to  ravage  the 
territory  of  the  Chrisiian  Emperor.  But  to  do  this — even  to 
take  command  of  one  such  fleet — was  a  very  different  thing 
from  a  life  devoted  to  the  adventures  of  a  '  sea  king,'  which 
we  may  suppose  was  the  life  of  Ragnar  Lodbrok.  This  might 
account  for  his  popularity  in  northern  tradition. 

In  the  cases  of  Hasting  and  Hrolf,  personages  who  are  both 
historical  and  mythical,  we  find  them  credited  with  the  leader- 
ship in  many  important  Viking  expeditions,  whereas  the  con- 
temporary annals  make  no  mention  of  them.  It  is  quite 
possible,  however,  that  they  were  really  present  in  these 
voyages,  but    that    they  were   present   as   subordinates   only. 

1  The  identification  would  be  altogether  far-fetched  were  it  not  for  the 
tradition  of  the  great  battle  in  which  Ring  engaged  a  Harald  (Harald  Hilde- 
tand)  while  Ragnar  fought  by  his  side.  Munch  s  reckoning  for  the  date  of 
Ragnar's  birth  is  A.D.  740  or  750,  more  than  a  hundred  years  before  we 
begin  to  hear  of  his  sons — Munch's  Ragnar  Lodbrok  could  not,  of  course, 
have  taken  part  in  the  siege  of  Paris  in  a.d,  845, 


288  RAIDS  IN  THE  FRANKISH  EMPIRE. 

Something  the  same  may  have  been  the  case  with  Ragnar.  He 
may  have  borne  a  share  in  many  of  the  earlier  Viking  cruises, 
though  the  chroniclers  make  no  mention  of  him  ;  and  on 
account  of  his  royal  descent  and  his  after-achievements  tradi- 
tion may  have  promoted  him  to  the  rank  of  leader  in  them. 

Of  the  Norse  history  of  Ragnar's  life  which  grew  up  in 
later  centuries  it  is  not  necessary  to  say  much,  so  utterly 
fabulous  is  it,  not  even  uniform  in  the  traditions  of  different 
countries.  The  very  dates  are  inconsistent.  Ragnar,  in  one 
account,  is  said  to  have  lived  three  generations  earlier  than 
the  first  colonists  of  Iceland,  which  would  put  back  his  birth 
to  something  like  780.1  But  his  sons,  who  are  more  con- 
spicuous than  he  himself  in  the  actual  Viking  history,  were 
flourishing  ninety  or  a  hundred  years  later.  Halfdan,  for 
instance,  seems  to  have  been  killed  about  878  ;  Ubbe,  another 
son,  very  nearly  at  the  same  time.  They  neither  of  them 
died  of  old  age.  Other  of  the  sons  of  Lodbrok  were  probably 
alive  still  later. 

The  north  was  full  of  fabulous  stories  of  Ragnar  Lodbrok, 
the  best  known  of  which  was  the  tale  of  how  he  won  Thora 
to  wife  from  out  the  house  where  she  was  guarded  by  the 
dragon,  the  'Lindworm,'  who  lay  upon  a  pile  of  gold.  It 
would  be  no  more  than  a  repetition  of  the  history  of  Sigurd 
the  Volsung,  and  of  I  know  not  how  many  heroes  of  northern 

1  Not  certainly  if  we  bring  down  the  date  of  the  discovery  of  Iceland  as 
Vigfusson  would  do  (see  C.  P.  B.  ii.  487).  But  however  that  may  be,  the 
two  Icelandic  Sagas  in  the  Fornaldar  Sogur  which  contain  the  account  of 
Ragnar's  life,  cannot  be  shown  to  be  earlier  than  the  thirteenth  century. 
The  ballad  supposed  to  have  been  sung  by  Ragnar  as  he  lay  in  the  serpent 
pit  of  i^Ella  (the  Krakumal)  is  perhaps  earlier.  Saxo's  account  [Hist.  Dan. 
ix.)  brings  Ragnar  into  connection  with  some  events  in  the  history  of 
Denmark  which  have  been  related  in  previous  chapters,  e.g.,  with  the 
Harald  who  was  baptized  at  Mainz  in  a.d.  826.  Saxo's  Ragnar  is 
Harald's  rival  for  the  throne  of  Denmark.  On  the  strength  of  this  con- 
nection (such  as  it  is)  some  writers  have  identified  Ragnar  with  Reginfred, 
Harald's  brother.  See  Storm,  Kritiske  Unders5gelse,ikG»%  and  above,  p.  220, 


RAGNAR  LODBROK.  289 

1 
fable,  save  that  it  makes  Lodbrok  gain  his  victory  and  his  own 

nickname  by  putting  on  the  celebrated  'hairy  creeks,'  which 
were  impervious  to  the  dragon's  teeth. 

Another  of  Ragnar's  marriages,  that  with  the  girl  Kraka, 
whose  real  name  was  Aslaug,  and  who  proved  to  be  the  daughter 
of  Sigurd  Fafnisbane  himself,  does  bring  Ragnar  in  actual 
connection  with  the  Volsung  epic  cycle. 

The  stories  of  Ragnar's  conquests  in  Sweden,  in  Finland,  in 
Russia,  and  in  England,  are,  as  they  have  come  to  us,  wholly 
out  of  character  with  the  adventures  of  a  hero  in  the  earlier 
Viking  Age  ;  though  I  think  it  not  unlikely  that  there  may  have 
been  some  corresponding  real  adventures  out  of  which  these 
fabulous  conquests  have  grown.  We  cannot,  for  instance,  deny 
the  significance  of  the  existence  of  a  real  king  '^Ella'  in 
England,  just  at  the  time  when  Ragnar's  sons  make  their 
great  invasion  of  this  country  —  a  short-reigned  king, 
whose  name  could  never  have  been  preserved  in  Norse 
tradition  save  through  some  special  connection  with  Viking 
exploits. 

In  the  expedition,  whereof  we  have  now  to  speak,  alone, 
of  845,  do  we  find  Ragnar  figuring  in  authentic  history. 
This  expedition,  we  have  reason  to  believe,  like  the  one  which 
almost  at  the  same  time  set  sail  for  the  Elbe,  was  fitted 
out  by  Horik  himself,  or  under  his  immediate  sanction. 
The  fleet  consisted  of  a  hundred  and  twenty  sail,  and  in 
March,  845,  it  made  its  way  to  the  mouth  of  the  Seine  and 
navigated  once  again  to  Rouen.  The  Vikings  were  not  this 
time  content  with  plundering  Rouen  and  the  neighbourhood, 
but  continued  their  sail  up  the  river  as  far  as  Chalevanne, 
near  St.  Germains-en-Laye.  Charles  the  Bald  heard  of  their 
coming,  and  called  together  what  troops  he  might.  But  the 
people  were  weary  with  the  long  civil  war,  with  the  battles 
against  Lothair,  Pippin,  Bernard,  Count  Lambert,  Nominoi, 

20 


290  RAIDS  IN  THE  FRANKISH  EMPIRE. 

king  of  Brittany ;  in  which,  if  Charles  had  gained  some  great 
advantages,  he  had  suffered  many  defeats.  During  this  period 
of  half-anarchy,  too,  and  civil  war,  the  nobles  had  grown 
more  and  more  independent  and  disinclined  to  fulfil- their 
duties  as  vassals.  They  would  content  themselves  with  de- 
fending their  own  estates,  and  the  inland  nobles  had  no 
fear  of  Viking  onslaught — they  deemed  they  had  cause  for 
none.  So  it  was  only  with  a  small  army  that  Charles,  after 
one  vain  attempt  to  check  the  advance  of  Ragnar,  threw  him- 
self into  the  strong  abbey  of  St.  Denis  to  watch,  rather  than 
oppose,  the  approaching  Danish  fleet.  This,  after  a  prosperous 
sail,  almost  unchecked,  came,  towards  the  end  of  the  month — 
for  the  first  time  in  Viking  history — under  the  walls  of  Paris. 
It  had  navigated  into  far-inland  regions,  which  formed  till 
now  a  terra  incognita  to  the  Northmen. 

The  island   city    of   the   Seine — its   extent  was 

AT)   845 

only  what  the  lie  de  la  cite  is  to-day — was  be- 
ginning to  emerge  into  notice,  and  make  for  itself  a  place 
among  the  chief  cities  of  the  kingdom.  The  early  Carling 
kings  had  little  to  say  to  it.  Pippin  of  Heristal  alone  of  this 
family  had  been  buried  near  its  walls,  in  St.  Denis' Abbey; 
and  one  of  the  first  public  acts  of  Paris  in  Carling  days  was 
the  part  it  took  in  giving  a  head  to  the  rebellion  of  Pippin 
of  Aquitaine  against  his  father.  It  began  in  this  wise — as 
Palgrave  says — its  career  as  a  city  of  revolutions.  Paris  had 
been  a  quasi-royal  town  under  the  Merovingians,  during  at 
least  some  portion  of  the  Merovingian  period :  we  know 
that  our  Queen  Berchta  was  the  daughter  of  the  king  of 
Paris.  The  succeeding  dynasty  had  its  chief  royal  seats 
at  Aix,  at  Rheims,  and  Laon,  never  here.  But  with  or  with- 
out royal  favour  Paris  continued  to  grow  by  virtue  of  the 
inherent  advantages  of  its  situation.  The  protection  of  the 
river  had  perhaps   been  the   reason  that  induced  the  Gauls 


FIRST  A  TTACK  ON  PARIS.  291 

of  the  tribe  of  the  Parish  to  settle  on  that  swampy  place, 
and,  like  the  lake-dwellers  of  Switzerland,  to  raise  upon  its 
muddy  soil  the  cluster  of  huts  which  earned  for  the  site  its 
unsavoury  name,  Lutetia  Parisiorum  —  mud-town  of  the 
Parisii. 

The  descendants  of  the  old  Parisii  lived  on,  a  sturdy 
population  of  merchants,  mechanics,  and  boatmen  —  or,  as 
we  should  say,  bargees ;  sturdy,  rebellious,  not  over-scrupu- 
lous ;  living  in  part  by  the  cost  of  pilotage  and  porterage  up 
and  down  the  stream  ;  in  part,  less  honourably,  by  the  tolls 
which  their  island  position  enabled  them  to  exact.  The  town 
yielded  to  few  towns  in  France  for  the  sacredness  of  its  associa- 
tions. Paris  itself  was  dedicated  to  the  Virgin,  as  the  cathedral 
church  of  '  Our  Lady '  serves  still  to  remind  us  ;  and  it  stood 
under  the  almost  immediate  guardianship  of  four  great  monas- 
teries— St.  Denis,  St.  Genevieve,  and  the  two  St.  Germains — 
l'Auxerrois  and  des  Pres.  No  inconsiderable  part  of  its  future 
fortune  Paris  owed  to  the  fame  of  these  saints.  What  help  it 
might  expect  at  their  hands  now  the  event  was  to  show. 

The  merchants  and  bargemen  of  Paris  did  little  themselves 
to  defend  their  homes  or  their  shrines  ;  and,  almost  unopposed, 
the  Vikings  came,  on  March  28,  845,  pouring  into  the  city, 
slaying  and  burning.  Unrestrained  by  any  divine  fear  they 
stormed  into  the  sacred  places.  The  saints  cannot,  it  seems, 
protect  their  own  !  But  stay — wThile  the  marauders  are  still 
in  the  Church  of  St.  Germanus,  behold  a  thick  fog  falls  upon 
them.  They  are  '  blinded  by  the  darkness  of  their  own  wicked- 
ness,' say  some  of  the  Frankish  chroniclers.  '  They  are  seized 
with  a  frenzy,'  say  others.  According  to  the  tradition  of 
their  own  people  in  long  after-years,  these  Vikings  had  voyaged 
to    the   region    of    mists    and    enchantments  —  Bjarmaland.1 

1  Aimon,  ftlirac.  S.  Germ.  (Acta  SS.  May  28th)  ;  Duchesne,  ii.  657  ;  Ann 
Xant.  a. a.  ;  Ann.  Bert,  rel.te  the  same  event,  but  refer  it  to  an  attack  on 


292  RAIDS  IN  THE  FRANK  IS  H  EMPIRE. 

Certain  it  is,  in  sober  language,  that  they  were  enveloped  in 
a  thick  fog,  in  which  both  they  and  the  Christians  saw  some- 
thing supernatural.  The  fog  was  so  dense  that  they  could  with 
difficulty  find  their  way  back  to  their  ships.  Many  lost  them- 
selves, and  were  slain  by  the  enraged  Parisians.  And  worse 
than  this,  it  was  a  kind  of  choleraic  mist.  (The  winter,  we 
remember,  had  been  one  of  extraordinary  severity  and  of 
extraordinary  mortality ;  this  illness  was  perhaps  the  result  of 
some  sudden  warm  spring  weather  supervening  upon  the 
intense  cold.)  The  fleet's  crew  were,  on  their  return,  seized 
with  a  dysentery  which  did  not  leave  them  even  when  they 
had  reached  home  with  their  booty.  Ragnar  sailed  back  to 
Denmark,  and  brought  to  Horik  the  king  a  pillar  which  he 
had  plundered  from  St.  Germain's  Church.  But  he  and  his 
followers  likewise  brought  with  them  the  sickness  which  had 
accompanied  the  fleet,  and  which,  it  is  said,  now  began  to 
make  havoc  in  Horik's  capital ;  until  he  bethought  him  of 
sending  back  the  Christian  prisoners  unransomed,  when,  as 
we  are  told,  the  illness  was  stayed.  Perhaps  as  a  mere 
sanitary  precaution  his  dismissal  of  the  prisoners  was  to  be 
recommended. 

Whatever  be  the  real  history  of  this  incident,  its  occur- 
rence and  the  impression  which  it  made  upon  both  Christians 
and  heathens  is  a  matter  beyond  dispute.     And  it  is  a  matter 

St.  Bertin.  The  Northmen  are  'struck  with  blindness  and  madness,' and 
Horik  declares  himself  ready  to  restore  prisoners  and  plunder  (a. a.  845). 
Saxo  Gram.  Hist.  Dan.  ix.  (ed.  Holder,  1866,  p.  30^).  See  Chapter  V. 
The  account  in  Saxo  is  wholly  consistent  with  the  way  in  which  we  know 
that  myths  travel  and  change  their  meaning.  The  earlier  Vikings  having 
fancied  themselves  in  Bjarmaland  when  they  were  attacking  Paris,  the 
story  in  Saxo  is  transferred  to  the  geographical  Bjarmaland,  i.e.,  to  Perm  in 
the  north  of  Russia.  But  how  mythical  a  place  Saxo's  Bjarmaland  really  is, 
can  be  judged  from  the  story  of  Gorm's  voyage  to  the  same  place  (Ibid. 
p.  287  seq.).  Then  learning  from  Christian  sources  of  Ra  mar's  attack  on 
Paris,  Saxo  transfers  that  also  to  his  history.  For  another  aspect  of  the 
same  event  see  Pasch.  Radb,  in  Migne,  t,  120,  col  1220. 


"HAUNTED  LIFE"  OF  THE  VIKINGS.  293 

well  worth  noting.  In  earthly  weapons  Western  Christendom 
from  this  time  forward  for  many  years  made  no  head  against 
the  Vikings.  But  her  spiritual  arms  were  imperceptibly 
recovering  what  was  lost  by  the  temporal  ones,  and  were 
slowly  undermining  the  power  of  the  Northmen  at  the  very 
time  that  power  was  being  raised;  just  as  Christianity  had  done 
once  before  in  the  case  of  the  earlier  Teutonic  '  Wanderers.' 
Like  the  Teutonic  nations  who  had  preceded  them,  when  the 
Northmen  passed  within  the  charmed  circle  of  the  Roman 
Church,  their  old  creed  seemed  to  forsake  them.  Their  gods 
could  not  breathe  in  the  new  air.  The  story  just  related 
is  one  of  many  instances  of  the  haunted  life  which  the 
Northmen  sometimes  led  between  their  growing  sense  of 
the  power  of  the  Christian  God  and  their  continued  de- 
fiance of  the  Christian  armies.  How  many  instances  there 
are  of  a  victorious  northern  conqueror,  in  the  midst  of  his 
career  of  victory,  abandoning  the  creed  of  his  own  people  and 
adopting  that  of  the  people  he  despised  and  had  just  con- 
quered. In  this  wise  when  a  few  generations  had  elapsed, 
from  being  the  enemies,  the  Northmen  became  the  doughtiest 
champions  of  the  Church,  though  in  their  own  dark  way — the 
Puritans  of  mediaeval  Christendom. 

We  have  sometimes  in  the  later  personal  biographies  of  the 
Scandinavians  incidents  which  illustrate  the  process  of  the 
Vikings'  conversion,  and  of  what  I  have  called  their  haunted 
life  before  that  conversion  was  completed,  which  belonged  to  a 
great  part  of  the  Viking  Age.  In  the  story,  for  example,  of 
Gisli  Surson,  or  Gisli  the  Outlaw,1  we  have  a  typical  example. 
This  Gisli  lived,  of  course,  a  century  and  more  after  the  Vikings 
w'-.o  were  now  beginning  to  harry  Europe ;  but  what  they  went 

1  Gisla  Saga  Siirsonar — '  Gisli  the  Outlaw.'    Dasent. 


294  RAIDS  IN  THE  FRANKISH  EMPIRE. 

through   in  the  ninth  century  the  Icelanders  were  beginning 
to  go  through  in  the   tenth  and  eleventh.1     Of  Gisli  we  first 
hear  how  he  and   his  friend  Vesstein  go,  in  the  course  of  a 
merchant  voyage,  to  Viborg,  in  Denmark,  and  for  the  sake  of 
carrying  on  trade  with  the  Christians  there,  allow  themselves 
to  be  marked  with  the  cross.     Afterwards  we  hear  incidentally 
that,  since  he  had  been  at  Viborg,  Gisli  had  left  off  heathen 
sacrifices.      Then    we  have   the   account    of  the   two  dream- 
wives  who  visit  him,  one  of  whom  is  soft  and  mild,  the  other 
dreadful  and  bloody  like  a  Valkyria.      '  I  have  two  women 
who    sit  with  me   in   my  dreams,'  he  says,   '  one  is  good  to 
me,  but  the  other  tells  me  nought  but  evil,  and  her  tale  is 
every    day  worse   and    worse,  and    she   spaes   me   downright 
ruin.     But  what  I  just  dreamed  is  this  :  Methought  I  came 
to  a  house  or  a  hall ;  into  the  hall  I  went,  and  there   I  saw 
many  of  my  friends  and  kinsfolk,  and  they  sat  by  fires  and 
drank.     There  were  seven  fires ;  some  had  burned  very  low, 
but  some  still  burned,  as  bright  as  bright  could  be.     Then 
in  came  my  better  dream-wife,   and  said  these  were    tokens 
of  my  life,  how  much  of  it  was  to  come ;  and  she  counselled 
me  so  long  as  I  lived,  to  leave  all  old  misbeliefs  and  ivitchcraft 
and  to  be  good  to  the  deaf  and  tlie  halt  and  the  poor  and  the  weak" 
This  picture — the  black  and  white  spirits   (so  common   in 
Christian    folk-lore),2   of   whom    one,   like    a   Valkyria,   gives 
bloody  counsel,  the  other,  like  an  angel,  is  full  of  Christian 
maxims  ;  the  seven  fires   (a  touch  of  St.  Fursey  here) ;  then 
again  the  more  Eddaic  picture  of  the  dead  friends  and  kins- 
folk drinking  in  the  hall — it  is  a  true  combination  of  Christian 
and  heathen  mythology. 

1  The  date  given  for  Gisli  isA.D.  930-980.  The  Life  itself  was  no  doubt 
made  some  time  after  the  latter  date. 

2  Compare,  for  example,  the  well-known  story  of  Hackelberg  as  given  in 
Kuhn's  Sagen  Gebrduche  u.  Marchen  ii.  no.  9.  Hackelberg  is,  according  to 
Vigfusson,  an  Icelander— Hekla  personified,  in  fact.     But  I  greatly  doubt. 


CHAPTER  X. 

DEFENCES  BROKEN  DOWN. 
a.d.  846-A.D.  858. 

I. 

The  Scandinavians  adopted  a  special  name,  Primsigning* — 
first-signing — for  the  custom  of  allowing  oneself  to  be  marked 
with  a  cross,  as  we  saw  that  Gisli  did  in  his  day.  Even  now 
this  had  become  not  infrequent  among  the  Northmen,  especially 
in  those  countries  which  bordered  upon  the  empire — or,  in 
other  words,  upon  the  kingdom  of  Lewis ;  for  he  now  owned 
the  marches  between  Germany  and  Denmark.  The  custom 
was  useful  for  trade  purposes  among  others.  But  it  had  also  a 
certain  religious  significance  of  a  highly  characteristic  kind. 
It  was  a  half-way  house  on  the  road  to  baptism.  It  did  not 
commit  the  recipient  too  far.  But  at  the  same  time  there  was 
a  sort  of  charm  in  it — against  disease,  the  darts  of  enemies,  and 
so  forth. 

Baptism  itself  the  Northerners,  or  in  fact  converted 
heathens  of  any  sort,  generally  put  off  as  late  as  possible,  till 
their  death-beds  if  that  might  be ;  following  the  example,  for 

1  Also  primsignan,  see  Vigfusson,  Icel.  Diet.  s.  v.  primsigna,  and  Njdla, 
158. 


296  DEFENCES  BROKEN  DO  VVN. 

instance,  of  Slavomir,  the  king  of  the  Abodriti  in  Charlemagne's 
day,  who  remained  a  heathen  till  he  was  upon  his  death-bed, 
and  then  had  himself  baptized  ;  or  much  more  distinguish*  d 
examples  among  the  converted  Romans  in  the  early  days  of 
Christianity,  such  as  that  of  the  great  Constantine  himself. 
And  why?  Not  so  much,  or  at  any  rate  not  only,  that  they 
might  defer  the  evil  hour  when  they  must  renounce  many  of 
their  old  pleasures ;  but  because  baptism,  as  a  sacrament,  was 
to  them  one  of  the  supreme  magic  rites  of  the  Christian  Church 
— a  church  which  had  so  many  strange  dealings  with  the  super- 
natural world — a  supreme  charm  against  the  devil  and  the  dark 
powers  from  below.  To  die  in  the  white  garments  of  baptism 
was  to  go  straight  to  the  Christian  heaven,1  and  to  go  straight 
away  from  the  Christian  hell  in  which,  at  any  rate,  these 
heathens  were  beginning  to  believe  and  tremble. 

The  seed  planted  by  St.  Fursey  long  ago,  or,  if  you  will,  still 
longer  ago  by  the  Seer  of  Patmos,  had  grown  and  borne  fruit. 
The  lives  of  the  saints  begin  now  to  be  filled  with  visions  of 
the  celestial  and  infernal  kingdoms.  Men  trembled  before  the 
skyey  portents,  which  were,  perhaps,  rather  exceptionally  com 
mon  in  this  century — comets,  eclipses,  meteor  showers,  northern 
lights;  that  curious  dispersion  in  the  air  of  a  tiny  fungoid 
growth  causing  the  descending  rain  or  snow  to  be  tinged 
with  red,  which  hence,  in  popular  superstition,  becomes  a  rain 
of  blood — all  these  natural  phenomena,  looked  at  with  the  eye 
of  fear,  took  spectral  and  portentous  shapes. 

Add  to  these  motives  the  more  commonplace  influence  of 
trade ;  the  material  advantages  which  some  places  such  as 
Sleswick — which  for  a  short  while  was  a  town  of  the  empire 
— were  visibly  gaining  through  peaceful  intercourse  between 
Dane  and  Christian;  and  you  have  the  explanation  of  the  peace 

1  Thus,  in  the  life  of  Anscar,  Rimbert  speaks  of  the  many  northern  con- 
verts who,  dying  in  their  baptismal  garments,  went  straight  to  heaven. 


HERIGAR.  297 

which  soon  began  to  reign  upon  the  borders  of  Lewis's  king 
dom,  in  the  very  parts  where  matters  had  looked  most  threaten- 
ing in  Charlemagne's  day. 

In  more  distant  fields,  however,  things  did  not  always  go 
smoothly  with  the  missionaries.  About  the  time  when  Horik 
the  Dane  was  setting  on  foot  the  two  great  expeditions  which 
in  the  same  year  fell  upon  Paris  and  upon  Hamburg,  there 
was  a  rising  of  the  Swedes  in  far-away  Sigtuna  against  the 
colony  of  Christians  planted  by  Anscar.  Gauzbert,  the  first 
bishop  of  the  country,  was  driven  forth,  his  nephew  was  killed, 
and  for  some  years  after  that  the  flock  in  Sweden  was  without 
a  pastor.  A  few  of  the  new  creed  remained  faithful  to  the  belief 
they  had  learned  ;  among  others  Hergar,  the  Earl  or  governor 
of  Birca  island.1  And  stories  of  the  wonders  by  which  these 
converts  had  testified  the  power  of  their  faith  travelled  south 
and  gave  joy  in  Christian  circles.  Herigar  imitated  the  miracle 
ot  Elijah  or  Gideon,  and,  as  a  heavy  raincloud  was  on  the  point 
of  bursting,  he  prayed  in  contest  with  the  heathen  priests  that 
no  rain  should  fall  upon  him  or  those  who  stood  by  his  side; 
which  happened  as  he  had  desired,  whereas  the  priests  of  Odin 
a  few  paces  off  were  caught  in  a  deluge.  At  another  time,  when 
a  certain  exiled  Swedish  king  returned,  supported  by  a  Danish 
contingent  to  destroy  the  town  of  Birca,  Herigar  obtained  by 
his  prayers  that  the  king's  heart  should  be  changed,  and  that 
the  Danes  themselves  should  be  induced  to  sail  away,  and, 
instead  of  Birca,  to  attack  one  of  the  Slavonic  towns  upon  the 
Baltic  coast.2     Stories  like  these,  I  say,  travelled  south,  and 

1  Vita  Anscari,  c.  19  (Pertz,  ii.  701  sq.). 

2  Or  Curland  on  the  Gulf  of  Finland,  which  had  formerly  belonged  to  the 
kings  of  Suithiod,  but  had  now  made  itself  independent.  The  Danes 
attacked  the  Curlanders,  but  were  driven  off.  Aterwards  the  Swedes, 
besieging  one  of  their  towns,  Pilten,  without  success,  were  on  the  point  of 
retiring,  after  having  vainly  called  on  all  their  gods  in  turn.  They  at  last 
bethought  them  of  the  Chiistians'  God.      When  He  had  been  invoked,  the 


298  DEFENCES  BROKEN  DOWN. 

were  no  doubt  eagerly  welcomed  by  the  Christians ;  but  that 
much  impression  was  made  upon  the  Swedes  themselves  by 
these  marvels  does  not  appear.  The  Christian  missionaries 
were  in  need  of  such  comfort  as  they  could  gather,  for  that 
there  had  been  no  fulfilment  of  the  high  hopes  which  accom- 
panied the  foundation  of  the  Hamburg  archbishopric  was  only 
too  evident. 

It  was  an  archbishopric,  one  of  but  three  in  the  dominions 
of  Lewis  the  German ;  but  an  archbishopric,  one  might  almost 
say,  without  parishes;  only  four  baptistries  (baptismal  churches)1 
formed  its  diocese.  In  revenues  it  had  lost  hugely  through  the 
Abbey  of  Turnout,  which  had  been  originally  assigned  for  its 
maintenance,  falling  to  the  portion  of  Charles  the  Bald,  and  being 
by  him  converted  to  his  own  uses.  The  heathen  lands  had  not 
'come  in;'  but  the  Vikings  had  done  so  in  most  disastrous 
fashion  in  845,  and  now,  too,  Hamburg  itself,  the  greater  part  of 
the  town  and  its  cathedral,  lay  all  black  cinders,  and  Anscar 
had  been  driven  out  to  wander  in  the  neighbouring  forests. 

However  in  847  he  was  reinstated,  first  as 
Bishop  of  Bremen,  afterwards  again  Archbishop  of 
Hamburg,  with  an  enlarged  diocese.2  And  he  soon  began  to 
exert  himself  to  spread  Christianity  among  his  heathen  neigh- 
bours. The  interposition  of  St.  Germanus  in  the  memorable 
Paris  siege  produced  its  effect  upon  King  Horik.  Count 
Cobbo,  Lewis's  ambassador  to  the  Dane,  reported  that  Ragnar 
the  Viking  on  his  return  from  Paris  brought  to  his  master 
spoils   from   the  St.  Germain's   Church,  a  porphyry  pillar  and 

Curlanders  of  their  own  accord  sounded  a  parley  and  offered  a  ransom  of 
one  pound  of  silver  for  every  head  in  the  town.  Vita  Ans.  c.  30 ;  cf. 
Ann.  Xan.  845  and  note  on  following  page. 

1  Vita  Ansc.  c.  22. 

2  Vila  Ansc.  c.  21-23,  and  Adam  of  Bremen  Gesta  H.  Pont.  i.  The 
whole  history  of  the  transactions  connected  with  the  Archbishopric  of  Ham- 
burg is  rather  complicated.     Cf.  Migne  T.  119,  col.  876. 


ANSCAR  AND  HORIK.  299 

other  things  robbed  from  the  church  itself ;  that  while  he  was 
still  in  converse  with  the  king  he  was  seized  with  the  fatal  sick- 
ness. In  vain  he  vowed  to  restore  what  he  had  carried 
away  for  his  own  spoil — a  silver  image  of  St.  Germain  for  one 
thing — for  after  three  days'  agony  he  died.  Horik  trembled. 
He  sent  ambassadors  to  Lewis  to  say  he  had  set  all  his  Chris- 
tian prisoners  at  liberty.1 

Of  Ragnar's  death  we  may  take  leave  to  doubt.  We  have 
one  or  two  stories  of  exactly  this  date  detailing  the  fatal  effects 
produced  by  sacrilegious  plunder.  The  effects  are  magical. 
Even  those  who  unwittingly  harbour  the  unclean  thing  pay  in 
goods  or  life,  or  in  the  lives  of  those  dearest  to  them.  They 
find  out  the  cause  of  their  suffering,  perhaps,  just  when  the  last 
member  of  their  family  has  died.  By  this  time  there  could 
scarcely  have  been  a  single  living  Viking  who  had  not  borne  a 
part  in  the  plundering  of  some  shrine ;  had  the  effects  of  sacri- 
lege been  everywhere  so  sweeping,  half  of  the  Scandinavian 
race  must  have  incontinently  perished.  If  the  Ragnar  of  the 
Paris  siege  was  the  Ragnar  Lodbrok  of  tradition  he  certainly 
did  not  die  then  and  in  that  wise.  We  may  rather  believe  that, 
pocketing  his  share  of  the  seven  thousand  pounds  of  silver2 
which  Charles  had  paid  as  a  ransom,  he  set  out  in  search  of 
fresh  adventures  on  his  own  account.  Some  memory  of  these 
may  have  been  rightly  preserved  by  tradition,  though  history 
has  nothing  to  tell  of  them.  The  mythic  legend  of  Ragnar 
Lodbrok  sends  him  cruising  to  Russia,  to  Sweden,  and  to 
England.     Some  of  these  voyages  he  may  have  made  now. 

1  Aimon,  Mirac.  S.  Germ.  i.  c.  7 ;  Ann.  Xant.  845  (Rorik  for  Horik). 
The  description  of  the  casting  lots  in  the  passage  in  A.  X.  is  very  interesting. 
It  is  the  casting  of  twigs  {teina)  used  for  sortege,  as  in  Landn&ma,  iii.  8 ;  or 
in  a  passage  of  Ve'l-Ekla,  where  Earl  Hakon  casts  twigs  by  the  Gauta 
rocks  before  fighting  with  Othere.  Cf.  Hymiskv.,  '  hristo  tenia,'  'they 
shook  the  twigs'  (in  a  cloth  or  bag?).  This  sort  of  divination  should  not  be 
confounded  with  that  by  the  divining  rod,  as  in  C.  P.  B.  Index. 

2  Ann.  Bert.  845. 


300  DEFENCES  BROKEN  DOWN. 

What  appears  certain  with  regard  to  the  Ragnar  incident  is 
that  Horik,  for  his  part,  really  renounced  his  truculent  plunder- 
ing ways.  We  read  of  no  more  expeditions  organized  by  him  ; 
and  ere  long  we  read  of  the  close  friend  hip  which  sprang 
up  between  him  and  the  Archbishop  of  Hamburg,  and  how, 
finally,  Anscar  got  leave  to  build  a  Christian  church  (the 
Church  of  Our  Lady)  in  Horik's  capital,  the  trading  town  of 
Sleswick,  whither  Christian  merchants  were  always  resorting.1 
So  that  on  this  border  of  the  empire  there  was  peace,  and 
Lewis  the  German's  troubles  with  his  Scandinavian  neighbours 
were  for  the  present  at  an  end. 

Lewis  had,  however,  other  troubles  of  his  own.  The  Slavonic 
people  upon  his  eastern  borders  had  begun,  during  the  dis- 
turbance of  the  civil  war,  to  bethink  them  what  steps  they 
should  take  to  throw  off  the  unloved  Frankish  rule.  They 
had  never  been  bound  by  more  than  a  slender  tie  to  the 
empire  of  Charlemagne.  Now  seemed  the  time  to  get  rid  even 
of  that.  And  at  the  very  moment  when  Horik's  ambassadors 
sought  Lewis  at  Paderborn,  he  was  raising  an  army  to  bring  to 
obedience  the  most  northern  of  the  Slavonic  people  on  his 
borders,  the  Abodriti.2  These  did  not  venture  to  await  the  in- 
vasion, but  sued  for  peace.  But  almost  immediately, 
one  after  another  like  a  peal  of  bells,  the  other 
Slavonic  people  took  up  the  same  note  of  rebellion.  First  it  was 
the  Sorabians  or  Sorbs,  the  next  neighbours  of  the  Abodriti. 
Then  it  was  the  turn  of  the  Moravians,  and  when  an  army 
despatched  by  Lewis  had  laid  waste  their  country  and  was  re- 
turning through  the  territory  of  the  Bohemians,  these,  in  their 
turn  rose,  caught  the  Frankish  troops  in  a  morass  and  inflicted 
severe  losses  upon  them.3 

x  Vita  Ansc.  c.  24. 

x  Cf.  Ann.  Fuld.  845,  and  Xant.  846.  These  accounts  do  not  quite 
agree.  2  Ann.  Fuld.  ;  Xant. ;  Bert. 


LEWIS  AND  THE  SLAVS.  301 

The  other  rulers  of  the  empire  had  to  bear  the  brunt  of 
the  Viking  attacks  which  in  some  parts,  especially  in  Lothair's 
Frisian  province,  soon  became  almost  incessant.  I  say  rulers  of 
the  empire  ;  for  in  theory  it  was  still  one  vast  Frankish  Empire, 
with  different  parts  placed  under  the  special  protection  of 
different  kings,  the  elder  alone  (Lothair)  bearing  the  imperial 
title;  and  in  this  stage  it  continued  so  long  as  all  the  three  sons 
of  Lewis  the  Pious  remained  alive.  A  kind  of  legal  fiction  of 
an  empire ;  but  still  a  definite  stage  upon  the  road  to  complete 
disintegration. 

We  may  remember  this  thing,  moreover,  that  even  in  its  days 
of  greatest  oneness  the  Frankish  Empire  was  always  more  a  legal 
unity  than  a  real  one.  So  far  as  it  had  one  ruler,  Lewis  the 
Pious,  it  was  one.  But  the  enactments  of  that  emperor  were 
not  made  without  the  sanction  of  his  great  councils,  his  Champs 
de  Mai.  And  it  depended  in  a  great  measure  upon  the  neigh- 
bourhood in  which  that  assembly  was  held  what  colour  was 
given  to  its  proceedings.  If  Paris  or  Orle  ins  were  rebellious, 
Lewis  had  but  to  call  a  council  at  Nymuegen  or  Aix  to  find  the 
tables  turned  and  men  at  his  devotion.  A  commanding  per- 
sonality such  as  that  of  Charlemagne  could  impress  a  character 
of  unity  on  all  the  heterogeneous  mass.  But  under  a  lesser  ruler 
its  components  necessarily  fell  apart. 

To  the  imagination  of  the  Vikings  the  Frankish 
Empire  was  still  no  doubt  what  it  was  in  fiction 
only,  an  undivided  whole  into  which  they  were  still  peering  with 
uncertain  eager  gaze.  Each  year  they  grew  more  familiar  with 
the  sights  which  it  disclosed.  In  Frisia  they  were  already  be- 
ginning to  feel  at  home.  The  year  after  the  Paris  and  Hamburg 
sieges,  and  the  year  after  that,  they  came  up  the  Rhine  once 
more  as  far  as  Dorstad,  which  was  again  plundered  and  burnt.1 

1  Ann.  Fuld.  s.a. 


302  DEFENCES  BROKEN  DOWN 

'As  usual,'  says  one  chronicler,  '  they  plundered  in  Ostergau  and 
Westergau  (Frisia).' x  The  three  kings  met  in  847  at  Meersen,2 
and  they  sent  a  joint  message  to  Horik  of  Denmark  that  they 
should  hold  him  responsible  if  these  attacks  continued. 3  There 
was  something — in  appearance  at  any  rate — awful  in  a  threat 
proceeding  from  the  joint  rulers  of  nearly  all  Western  Chris- 
tendom. Nevertheless,  the  attacks  went  on.  Horik  pro- 
bably had  nothing  to  do  with  them.  The  Vikings  were 
growing  into  a  separate  body,  almost  a  new  nationality,  with 
kings  or  leaders  of  their  own.  The  reply  these  made  to  the 
Meersen  '  joint  note '  was  to  sail  up  this  year  nine  miles  above 
Dorstad.  And  in  Charles  the  Bald's  kingdom  they  were  equally 
truculent  and  t  reatening.  They  burnt  the  abbey  of  Noir- 
moutiers  in  846.  From  this  time,  or  near  it,  Noirmoutiers 
became  one  of  the  fixed  strongholds  of  the  Vikings,  from  which 
they  were  never  afterwards  dislodged.  The  same  Loire  Vikings 
raided  the  following  year  on  the  mainland  and  burnt  the 
monastery  of  Herbauge ;  and  now  Oscar's  fleet  sailed  once  more 
to  the  south  and  laid  siege  to  Bordeaux/  Here  Charles  had 
some  success  against  them  and  captured  nine  of  their  vessels. 
Bordeaux  itself  held  out  to  the  autumn  of  848,  and  then  (as 
modern  Frenchmen  would  have  been)  its  defenders 
'  were  trahis — by  the  Jews  as  they  declared 5 — or  the 
town  would  never  have  been  captured  by  the  Vikings.  '  The 
Northmen,'  says  a  chronicler,  in  these  years,  '  as  they  were 
wont  to  do,  put  the  Christians  to  shame  and  grew  more  and 
more  in  strength.  But  it  is  a  sorrow  to  have  to  write  these 
things.' 6 

8so  and  8«>i,  the  mid  years  of  this  disastrous  cen- 

A.D.  850-1.   .       D  L      r  r  c       xt   -a. 

tury,  were   years  of  peculiar  misery  for  Northern 

■  Ann.  Xan.  s.a.  9  Pertz,  Leges,  i.  393  sqq.  3  Ann.  Bert. 

4  Chron.  Fontanell.  848,  cf.  851  (P.  ii.  303-4).  5  Bert.,  848. 

*  Ann.  Xant.  848-9. 


ATTACKS  ON  FRISIA  AND  FRANCE  A.D.  850-1.    303 

Europe ;  for  our  island  as  well  as  for  the  Continental  stales. 
Rorik,  that  brother  of  Harald  the  baptized,  whom  we  have 
already  often  encountered,  Rorik  the  fel  Christianitatis,  was 
plundering  in  Frisia  and  had  to  be  bought  off.  Lothair  had 
begun  by  expelling  him  from  his  fief  of  Dorstad  on  the  ground 
of  treachery.  He  took  refuge  in  Saxony  and  remained  under 
the  protection  of  Lewis.  And  there  (more  or  less  with  the 
countenance  of  the  German  king)  he  fitted  out  a  fleet  and  with 
it  fell  upon  the  very  territory  from  which  he  had  been  expelled. 
Lothair  had  no  other  course  than  to  restore  him  to  favour.  He 
gave  over  to  him  almost  all  the  lands  in  his  northern  province, 
on  which  the  Vikings  had  begun  to  fasten,  on  condition  of  his 
protecting  the  country  from  other  fleets.1  We  may  believe  that 
Lothair  was  ready  enough  to  wink  at  any  plundering  of  the 
territory  of  his  neighbours,  especially  of  Charles  the  Bald, 
against  whom,  in  spite  of  formal  treaties,  his  anger  smouldered. 
It  was,  likely  enough,  agreeable  to  an  arrangement  between 
Lothair  and  Rorik  that  part  of  Rorik's  fleet  under  Godfred, 
Harald's  son,  sailed  south  into  West  Francia,  into  Flanders, 
and  plundered  Therouanne.  Oscar,  too  (his  Bordeaux  siege 
now  successfully  ended),  came  northward  to  the  same  district. 
Ghent — not  yet  the  great  Ghent  of  the  Middle  Ages,  but  a 
growing  town  2 — fell  before  his  attacks,  and  the  abbey  of  St. 
Bavo  hard  by.  From  Flanders  Oscar  and  Godfred  returned 
together  to  the  Seine  and  harried  far  and  wide.  Lothair,  says 
one  chronicle,  was  ready  to  join  with  Charles  in  attacking  these 
Vikings  but  the  West  Frank  king  preferred  separately  to  come 
to  terms  with  Godfred. 

In  the  autumn  of  the  year  850  these  Vikings  of  the  Seine 
discovered  an  old  tomb  of  one  Givoldus,  and  this  they  con- 

1  Ann.  Ftcld.  a. a.  ;  Ann.  Xant.  a.a.  ;  Ann.  Bert.  852.  The  chronology 
is  very  uncertain  at  this  period. 

?  Aim.  Lobienses,  850  (Pertz,  ii.  195);  Ann.  Gand.  851  (P.  ii.  187). 
Ghent  lay  just  on  the  borders  of  Lothair 's  and  Charles's  territories. 


304  DEFENCES  BROKEN  DOWN. 

verted  into  a  strong  fortified  camp,  and  wintered  there  in  the 
midst  of  the  Seine  country.1  Among  the  places  which  fell 
before  their  arms  was  a  monastery  not  very  far  from  the  mouth 
of  the  river,  a  place  of  ancient  foundation,  for  it  owed  its  origin 
to  one  of  the  Irish  missionaries  in  France.  From  him  it  took 
its  name  of  St.  Wandrille,  to  us  it  is  better  known  from  the  old 
Latin  name  of  the  place  as  Fontanelle,  and  for  the 
sake  of  its  chronicle  written,  part  of  it,  in  these  very 
years,  it  deserves  to  be  held  in  remembrance  by  the  historian.2 
Add  to  all  these  evils  that  in  some  parts  of  the  empire  there 
was  such  terrible  famine  that  people  are  said  to  have  killed  and 
eaten  their  own  children.  3 

Meanwhile  another  fleet,  prepared  by  Rorik,  a  gigantic  fleet 
of  350  sail,  made  for  the  English  coast.  Hitherto 
the  Viking  attacks  upon  England  had  been  but 
desultory.  The  earliest,  as  we  have  seen,  came  in  all  proba- 
bility from  Ireland — the  earliest,  1  mean,  in  this  century  ;  those 
quite  preliminary  exploring  raids  in  787  and  793-5,  I  leave  out 
of  account.  The  Irish  series  of  raids  ended  with  the  battle  of 
Hengstone  in  838,  or  soon  after.  The  next  attack  of  any  im- 
portance4 was  the  one  made  by  a  fleet  which  was  in  all  pro- 
bability Oscar's,  engaged  in  making  its  way  through  the  Channel 
to  seek  a  field  of  adventure  on  the  western  coast  of  France.  This 
is  the  raid  recorded  in  our  chronicle  as  the  great  slaughter  in 
London,  Quentovic,  and  Rochester.  It  is  given  under  date  839; 
the  true  year  is  undoubtedly  842,  the  date  given  in  the  Frankish 
chronicles  for  the  attack  on    Quentovic,  just  the  time  when, 

1  In  850-1  or  851-2;  see  Ann.  Fuld.  850  ;   Chron.  Font.  852. 
2  Steenstrup  places  the  attack  on  Fontenailles  in  A.D.  852.     Nor?n.  ii.  162. 

3  Ann.  Bert.  850. 

4  There  were  engagements  at  Southampton  and  at  Port  in  840 ;  the 
first  an  English,  the  second  a  Viking  victory. 


RORIK'S  ATTACK  ON  ENGLAND.  305 

(before  and  after  Fontenoy)  Oscar's  fleet  was  beginning  to 
plunder  in  the  Seine  and  the  Loire.  The  next  reliable  entry 
in  the  chronicle  is  under  the  year  845,  probably  for  846. »  It 
records  an  English  victory  on  the  Parret  in  Somersetshire. 
Hitherto  we  had  suffered  less  than  any  other  land  of  Western 
Christendom.  We  lay  between  two  eddies  :  one  the  Norse 
stream,  which  swept  round  Scotland  and  submerged  the  Scottish 
islands  and  almost  submerged  Ireland  ;  the  other,  the  Danish 
eddy,  which  swept  round  the  coasts  of  Frisia,  Flanders,  France, 
and  Aquitaine. 

But  the  year  in  which  Rorik's  great  fleet  sighted  our  coasts 
was  a  memorable  one  in  the  history  of  the  Viking  raids  in 
England.2  The  fleet  made  for  the  mouth  of  the  Thames.  The 
Isle  of  Thanet  was  then  in  reality  an  island  accessible  on  all 
sides  to  the  light  Danish  craft.  They  sailed  inside  it  and  up 
the  Stour  to  Canterbury,  whose  cathedral  towers  no  doubt  in- 
vited all  of  them  who  remembered  the  chucrhes  of  Utrecht  and 
Dorstad.  Canterbury  was  stormed  with  great  slaughter.  And 
now  the  murderous  fleet  steered  up  the  Thames  for  London. 
The  English  capital — say  rather  the  future  capital  of  England — 
had  once  already  felt  the  brunt  of  their  attack.  London  was  a 
Mercian  city,  and  on  the  approach  of  the  Vikings  the  Mercian 
king  Berhtwulf  hastened  down  to  defend  it.  He  encountered 
the  Danes  in  a  pitched  battle,  was  utterly  defeated,  and  soon 
after  died  of  the  wounds  he  had  received ;  the  enemy  spread 
north  of  the  river,  plundering  and  burning. 

But  they  found  a  poorer  country  here  than  that  they  were 
used  to  in  Wessex  and  in  Kent;  so  they  soon  again  crossed 
the  Thames  and  came  into  Surrey.  They  were  now  in  the 
territory  of  the  West  Saxon  kings — the  one  dynasty,  as  it 
happened,  which  was  destined  to  make  a  stand  against  their 


1  A,  S.  Chron.  s.a.  ■  Ibid.  851. 

21 


306  DEFENCES  BROKEN  DOWN. 

power,  the  dynasty  under  whom  alone  the  English  name  was  to 
find  a  refuge,  ^thelwulf  was  upon  the  throne.  He,  follow- 
ing in  the  steps  of  his  father,  marched  forward  into  Surrey  and 
gave  battle  to  the  triumphant  Rorik  and  his  Danes  at  Aclea 
(Ockley — Oak-Lea),  and  gained  a  most  signal  victory.  ^Ethel- 
wulf's  son,  ^Ethelbald,  fought  by  his  side.  Never  before  had 
there  been  such  a  slaughter  of  heathens  in  England,  so  tell  us 
the  English  chroniclers:  and  not  English  chroniclers  only 
celebrate  this  victory,  for  the  fame  of  it  spread  far.1 

This  may  have  been  the  end  of  Rorik's  fleet.  But  there  was 
nothing  decisive  in  the  victory  so  far  as  concerned  the  future 
history  of  the  Danes  in  England.  For  though  we  read  of 
other  successes  this  year — one  at  Wembury,  where  Ealdorman 
Ceorl  and  the  men  of  Devonshire  slew  many  of  the  Vikings,2 
better  still  a  naval  victory  gained  by  y'Ethelstan  and  Ealdorman 
Ealhere  (taking  nine  ships  and  dispersing  the  rest),  which 
ought  to  have  been  an  encouraging  phenomenon,  not  to 
England  only  but  to  Europe  at  large — with  all  these  appear- 
ances of  success  we  read  of  another  event  which  in  reality  far 
outweighs  them.  This  is  the  '  first  wintering  '  of  the  Vikings 
upon  English  soil — namely,  upon  the  island  of  Thanet. 

It  was  a  portentous  event.  In  Ireland  the  first  wintering  of 
the  Vikings  had  occurred  fifteen  or  sixteen  years  before,  in  835. 
It  had  been  followed  by  the  ail-but  conquest  of  the  whole 
country.  In  Frisia  the  Danes  had  often  wintered,  and  now 
found  themselves  quite  at  home  there.  But  what  with  the 
large  territories  which  had  been  assigned  to  the  Dane  Rorik, 
Frisia  seemed  to  be  slipping  out  of  the  feeble  grasp  of  Lothair. 
In  France  the  Danes  wintered  for  the  first  time  in  a.d.  843.3 
Again,  they  were  (as  we  saw  just  now)  a  year  besieging 
Bordeaux,  in  847-8.     The  first  time  we  have  any  notice  of 

1  Ann.  Bert.  850.  "  A.  S.  Chro?t.  s.a.  3  Ch.  IX. 


THE  VIKINGS  FORM  WINTER  CAMPS.         307 

their  settling  in  winter  quarters  in  the  Seine  country  is  in  this 
same  year,  85 1,1  when  they  settled  themselves  in  their  new 
camp,  Givoldi  fossa,  by  the  side  of  the  Seine,  and  remained  in 
the  country  236  days,  plundering  far  and  wide. 

We  may,  then,  take  the  middle  year  of  the  ninth  century, 
a.d.  850  or  851,  as  about  the  time  at  which  the  Danish  Vikings 
cease  to  be,  like  the  swallows,  summer  visitors  only,  but  begin 
to  pass  whole  years  through  in  the  enemy's  territory.2  This  is 
the  time  when,  as  a  natural  consequence,  the  career  of  Viking 
becomes  more  and  more  a  life  occupation,  and  those  who 
follow  it  become  more  and  more  separated  in  interests  from 
their  countrymen  at  home.  Only  five  years  ago  the  lands  they 
visited  for  a  momentary  plundering  raid  were  as  strange  to 
them  as  the  Bjarmaland  or  Jotunheim  of  their  mythic  world. 
Now,  as  they  grow  familiar  with  the  depths  and  shoals  of  all 
the  great  rivers  of  Europe,  their  own  land  begins  to  seem 
strange.  Once  or  twice  a  Viking  leader  turned  his  ambition 
homewards  and  sought  to  make  his  arm  felt  in  domestic  dis- 
putes. But  instances  of  this  practice  grow  more  rare  as  the 
century  advances.  The  acts  of  the  kings  of  Denmark  become 
less  and  less  interesting  to  the  Christian  chroniclers ;  in  a  few 
years  their  names  even  disappear  altogether.  On  the  other 
hand,  the  names  of  the  Viking  leaders  become  even  more  con- 
spicuous. The  new  profession  of  Sea-king  is  coming  into 
existence. 

The  safest  fixed  stations  for  the  Vikings,  whether  for  summer 
or  winter,  were  still  the  islands  close  to  the  mainland,  and  they 
held  one  of  these  at  the  mouth  of  each  of  the  largest  rivers — 
except  the  Rhine,  where  they  were  perhaps  too  much  at  home 
to  need  such  precaution.     They  held  Walcheren,  at  the  mouth 

1  Or  852,  see  Chron.  Fontan.  a. a. 

a  We  say  advisedly  Danish.  Ireland  and  Scotland  being  still  on  the 
whole  reserved  for  the  Norsemen  ;  albeit  it  was  precisely  in  this  year  or 
the  next  that  a  Danish  fleet  appeared  in  Irish  waters. 


3og  DEFENCES  BROKEN  DO  WN. 

of  the  Meuse  and  of  the  Scheld  :  though,  to  be  quite  exact, 
Walcheren  was  not  in  those  days  a  complete  island  ;  still  it 
was  nearly  enough  so  to  be  easily  defended.  At  the  mouth  of 
the  Seine  they  held  the  island  of  Oissel ;  but  they  were  not 
afraid  to  trust  themselves  far  inland  in  the  Givoldi  fossa.  At 
the  mouth  of  the  Loire,  or  just  south  of  it,  they  had  the  island 
of  Noirmontiers.  Finally,  at  the  mouth  of  the  Thames  they 
had  Thanet,  and  a  few  years  later  Sheppey. 

For  the  every-day  wants  of  these  toilers  of  the  sea  all  the 
neighbouring  coasts  would  supply  them  with  a  sufficient 
harvest.  What  an  expressive  word  is  that  peculiarly  northern 
one  Strandhog,  strand-slaughter;  meaning  a  raid  from  a  Viking 
vessel  upon  the  farms  near  the  coast,  the  capture  of  sheep  and 
cattle  which  were  driven  down  to  the  strand  and  slaughtered 
there  previously  to  being  shipped  and  carried  off.  These 
Strandhogs  were  now,  we  may  fancy,  going  on  along  all  the 
coasts  of  the  Netherlands  and  France;  fortunate  for  the 
people,  wherever  the  slaughter  the  seafarers  made  was  slaughter 
of  cattle  only. 

This  for  their  daily  wants.  But  inland  lay  a  boundless 
store  of  wealth  in  the  cities  and  monasteries  which  stood 
scattered  over  all  the  plains  of  the  Netherlai  ds  and  all  over 
douce  France.  The  plunder  of  the  holy  places  shocked  the  con- 
science of  Christendom.  What  was  worst  for  its  material  interests 
was  the  grip  which  the  Vikings  were  taking  of  the  veins  along 
which  flowed  the  life-blood  of  Christian  commerce — of  the 
Rhine  which  bore  the  soft-wares  of  Frisia,  and  the  wines  of 
Germany  ;  of  the  Meuse,  of  the  Seine,  of  the  Loire,  of 
the  Thames  ;  in  an  intermittent  way  of  the  Garonne.  Well 
if  these  '  anarchists '  had  been  content  to  take  tax  and  toll 
of  the  goods  which  passed  through  their  hands,  instead  of, 
by  seizing  all,  stopping  the  very  source  of  their  own  gains, 
killing   the   goose   which   laid    the    golden    eggs.     They    did 


COWARDICE  OF  CHARLES  THE  BALD.         309 

not  thus  refrain,  and  trade  was  already  beginning  to  languish. 
We  hear  little  more  of  Dorstad  after  the  middle  of  the  ninth 
century. 

To  the  tale  of  disaster  belonging  to  these  years 
we   must  add  a  very  furious  Viking  attack  upon 
Saxony.     A  fleet  came    sailing   up  the   Elbe.     They  entered 
Saxony  in  851  and  renewed  their  invasion  in  852.     A  whole 
district  was  laid  waste,  and  thousands  of  Saxons  met   their 
death.1 

III. 

It  was  time  for  the  rulers  of  Christendom,  time  especially 
for  the  lords  of  Fi  isia  and  of  France,  Lothair  and  Charles  the 
Bald,  to  be  doing  something.  Yet  they  had  with  difficulty 
been  withheld  during  recent  years  from  coming  to  blows  over 
a  variety  of  petty  differences,  and  renewing  the  civil  war.  How 
far  had  Lewis  winked  at  the  raid  which  Rorik  made  on  Lothair, 
and  Lothair  on  the  raid  which  Godfred  made  on  Charles  ? 
We  cannot  tell.  They  pretended  to  regard  the  Vikings  as 
the  common  enemy  of  Christendom.  From  time  to  time 
the  three  rulers  met  together  to  keep  up  the  appearance  of 
joint  action  in  the  government  of  the  empire ;  first  at  Thion- 
ville  (Diedenhofen),2  845,  then  at  Meersen  (847),  whence 
they  sent  that  threatening  message  to  Horik,  and  a  second 
time  at  the  latter  place  (85i).3  Beyond  that  threat  we  read 
little  of  either  separate  or  joint  action  against  the  Danes,  whose 
cruelties  were  (says  a  chronicler)  in  these  years  past  all  belief 
or  expression.  Charles  we  saw  did  try  and  relieve  Bordeaux, 
and  gained  one  small  success  on  the  Garonne.  He  gained 
another  against  a  troop  of  Vikings  who  had  boldly  ventured 

1  Ann  Xanten.  851,  852  (P.  ii.  229). 

3  Or  more  exactly  at  Juditz,  near  Diedenhofen. 

3  Ann.  Bert.  a.  851  (P.  i.  445-6)  gives  a  full  list  of  the  enactments  of 
this  '  Placitum  magnum  et  generale  '  {Chr,  Font);  see  also  P.  Leges,  ii, 
407, 


3 io  DEFENCES  BROKEN  DO  WN. 

far  inland  and  away  from  the  protection  of  their  fleet  to 
ravage  Beauvais.  They,  or  a  portion  of  their  band,  were 
caught  by  Charles's  troops  near  the  effluence  of  the 
Epte  and  cut  to  pieces.  The  one  advantage  which 
the  Franks  at  present  possessed  was  in  the  superiority  of  their 
cavalry  over  that  of  their  invaders,  who  perhaps  hardly  as  yet 
possessed  this  arm.  It  is  to  the  credit  of  Charles  the  Bald  that 
he  appreciated  the  importance  of  cavalry  in  this  warfare  of 
raids  and  sallies,  and  made  great  efforts  to  improve  his  own. 

But  this  alone  was  not  enough.  Charles  possessed  a  certain 
dogged  perseverance.  We  see  him  throughout  his  long  reign 
*  pegging  away,'  like  Abraham  Lincoln,  to  gain  his  ends,  what- 
ever they  might  be.  He  had  the  merit  of  never  despairing  of 
the  Republic,  great  as  the  temptations  to  do  so  must  have 
been.  But  he  was,  so  far  as  we  can  judge,  without  military 
talents,  and  we  are  sometimes  tempted  to  think  him  wanting  in 
personal  courage ;  sad  would  such  an  imputation  be  resting 
on  a  grandson  of  Charlemagne.  Yet  if  we  set  down  his 
refusal  to  join  with  Lothair  in  an  attack  on  Godfred  in  850  to 
distrust  of  his  brother  and  not  to  fear,  what  are  we  to  think 
of  the  sight  which  these  very  years  display  to  us  in  another  of 
Charles  the  Bald's  campaigns?  Charles,  as  we  know,  had 
many  things  upon  his  hands  beside  the  dreadful  Viking 
onslaughts ;  none  more  pressing  than  the  ever  victorious  revolt 
of  Brittany,  grown  now  so  victorious  and  successful  as  to 
deserve  to  be  called  a  revolt  no  longer,  rather  a  war  of 
independence.  Nominoi  who  began  it — the  peasant  prince 
who  had  accomplished  so  much  during  his  reign — had 
himself  crowned  as  independent  Breton  king  in  849,  and  next 
tried  to  make  his  bishops  as  independent  of  the  Frankish 
metropolitan  as  he  would  be  of  the  Frankish  king.  In  851  he 
died.1  But  his  son  Erispoi  was  as  brave  and  successful  as  the 
1  Ann.  Bert.  ;  Chron-  Fonten.  a.  a.  ;  Reginon,  Chron.  862  (misdated). 


COWARDICE  OF  CHARLES  THE  BALD.  311 

father.1  In  the  autumn  of  851  we  find  Charles  marching  to 
encounter  the  Bretons  with  a  strong  army  in  which  were 
numbered  not  only  his  native  Franks  but  a  band  of  Saxon 
mercenaries,  and  in  which  served  the  bravest  of  the  Frank 
noblesse,  Count  Vivianus  of  Tours.  Yet  when  the  armies 
met  near  Rennes,  at  the  first  assault  the  Saxon  light  infantry 
began  to  waver.  The  heavy  Frankish  horse  could  not  cope 
with  the  swift  darting  cavalry  of  the  Bretons.2  Just  as  things 
were  beginning  to  look  critical  the  cry  was  suddenly  raised, 
Where  is  the  king?  Charles  had,  in  fact,  taken  himself  off,  and 
left  his  troops  and  his  generals  to  get  out  of  their  difficulties  as 
best  they  might.  At  once  the  battle  changed  into  a  sauve  qui 
pent.  Count  Vivianus,  we  may  guess,  did  what  in  him  lay  to 
rally  his  troops.  When  the  flight  and  pursuit  were  over  he 
was  found  dead  upon  the  field  of  battle.  But  what  a  king  was 
this  to  make  head  against  the  sea  of  troubles  rolling  in  upon 
him  from  every  side ! 

Next  year  there  was  one  more  meeting  of  Charles 
and  his  eldest  brother  to  concert,  if  possible,  some 
joint  action  against  the  common  foe.  They  determined  on 
attacking  the  Danes  in  their  new-made  fortified  camp — Givold's 
Grave— in  the  Seine  country.  The  Vikings  were  under  the 
command  of  Godfred  and  of  a  new  leader,  Sidroc  or 
Sihtric — the  last  destined  to  find  a  grave  in  England. 
Lothair  brought  his  army  from  the  north,  Charles  brought  his 
from  the  west.  But  when  the  time  for  action  came,  Charles's 
courage  once  more  deserted  him,    or  he  distrusted  the  good 

1  '  Respogius '  Bert.  ;  Nomino'i's  death  is  represented  as  a  judgment  for 
the  destruction  of  churches  of  which  he  had  been  guilty ;  as  related  by 
Regino,  it  is  precisely  that  of  Felim  I.  of  Munster  ;  see  Ch.  VI. 

2  Regino  gives  a  lengthy  description  of  this  battle,  under  date  A.D.  860  ; 
if  the  account  is  trustworthy  it  lasted  two  days,  and  on  the  second  Charles 
fled.  Regino,  who  wrote  a.d  892-908,  is  so  confused  in  his  dates  that 
one  cannot  implicitly  trust  his  facts. 


3 1 2  DEFENCES  BROKEN  DO  WN. 

faith  of  his  ally,  or  he  thought  he  could  not  rely  upon  his  own 
troops.  And  in  the  event,  instead  of  a  united  attack  from  the 
kings  of  the  Middle  and  Western  kingdoms,  the  Danes  received 
a  heavy  bribe  from  Charles  to  take  their  departure,  which  they 
did — for  a  time.1  True  indeed  it  is  that,  as  our  chronicler 
writes, '  the  heathens  more  and  more  put  the  Christians  to  shame. 
But  it  is  wretched  to  have  to  write  these  things.'2  Wretched 
indeed  !  It  is  a  mere  catalogue  of  raids  and  plunderings,  with- 
out distinctive  features,  without  variety. 

Yet  one  must  not  quite  pass  over  a  raid  of 
the  Loire  Vikings  in  853  for  the  sake  of  a  place 
famous  in  the  history  of  France,  the  greatest  monastery,  we 
may  call  it,  of  the  Western  kingdom,  which  now  felt  the  weight 
of  their  attack.  First  the  Vikings  attacked  Nantes  ;  they 
penetrated  thence  deep  into  Poitou  country ;  then  late  in  the 
autumn  they  sailed  far  up  the  river  Loire,  which  might  almost 
now  be  called  their  river,  till  they  reached  the  world-famous 
abbey  of  St.  Martin  of  Tours.3  Tours  we  might  still  call  the 
monastic  metropolis  of  France.  It  had,  no  doubt,  lost  some- 
thing of  the  glory  which  surrounded  it  during  Merovingian 
days,  though  it  had  of  late  won  new  titles  to  fame.  In 
Merovingian  days  Tours  had  been  almost  an  umbilicus  orfo's, 
the  navel  at  least  of  the  northern  Christian  world,  the  Rome  of 
Christendom  north  of  the  Alps.  The  once  famous,  n<w  for- 
gotten, church  of  Whithem  or  Casa  Candida,  in  Strathclyde 
Britain — a  church  which  treated  on  equal  terms  with  Columba's 
Church  in  Scotland — was  a  daughter  foundation  to  St. 
Martin's  of  Tours,  and  took  its  name  therefrom.  Of  the 
status  of  St.  Martin's  in  France  there  is  the  less  need  to  say 
much,    because   the    name    of    the    great    historian    of    the 

1  Ann.  Bert. ;  Chron.  Font.  852  (P.  ii.  303).         3  Ann.  Kant.  s.a.  849. 
3  Ann.  Bert.  a.a. ;  Ann,    Fuld.  a,a.  \  Ann,  Xanfen.  854;  Steenstrup, 
Normanneme,  ii.  250, 


VIKING  RAID  ON  TOURS.  313 

Merovingians  is  indissolubly  united  with  it,  and  his  history 
never  lets  us  forget  the  glory  of  his  patron.  There  were  at  this 
moment  two  monasteries  of  St.  Martin  at  Tours,  one  within 
the  city,  the  other,  the  older,  without  the  walls,  at  Marmoutiers. 
Of  recent  years  Tours,  though  no  longer  ecclesiastically  so 
great  as  of  old,  had  been  illustrated  by  the  presence  within  her 
abbey  of  our  famous  Alcuin,  the  most  learned  of  all  the  divines 
and  statesmen  in  the  kingdom  of  Charles  the  Great ;  and 
among  his  pupils  there  he  had  numbered  Raban  (Hraban — 
the  Raven),  the  present  Archbishop  of  Mainz,  perhaps  the 
worthiest  living  successor  to  Alcuin  in  all  the  Frankish  Empire. 
Unhappy  that  neither  the  sacred  nor  the  literary  associations  of 
Tours  were  likely  to  make  impression  upon  the  plunderers  who 
were  now  nearing  its  walls  ;  nor  were  those  walls,  strong 
though  they  were,  able  to  withstand  their  fury.  And  if  there 
yet  remained  any  Frenchman  who  looked  upon  the  Viking 
terror  with  indifference,  he  could  hardly  do  so  after  this  fresh 
sacrilege. 

We  may  well  believe  that  public  opinion  in  the  kingdoms 
both  of  Lothair  and  Charles  cried  out  loudly  for 
some  decisive  action.  The  differences  which  still 
kept  apart  the  two  brothers  were  composed  at  a  meeting  at 
Valenciennes  ; "  and  at  another  meeting  at  Liege  2  the  question 
of  joint  action  against  the  enemy  was  once  more  discussed. 
Might  not  something  be  hoped  for?  But  Lothair  had  the 
experiences  of  two  previous  attempts  to  warn  him  against 
expecting  much  result  from  these  plans,  and  as  a  fact  he  seems 
almost  immediately  to  have  wearied  of  his  alliance  with  Charles, 


1  Pertz,  Leg.  i.  422. 

2  Ann.  Bert.  a.a.  854.  Charles's  union  with  Lothair  resulted  from  his 
fear  of  Lewis,  who  was  intriguing  with  the  discontented  nobles  of  West 
Francia  and  Aquitaine.  (See  below).  Charles,  on  his  side,  bribed  the 
King  of  the  Bulgars  to  invade  Lewis's  territory  {Ann,  Bert,  853.), 


3 14  DEFENCES  BROKEN  DO  WN. 

and  once  more  to  have  entered  into  negotiations  with  Lewis 
the  German.1 

However,  this  was  almost  the  last  effort  which  Lothair  was 
to  make  against  the  Danes  or  any  one  else.     His 

A.D.  855.  &_.       -  Tr 

power  as  a  friend  or  as  an  enemy  was  over,     tie 

who  with  such  vaulting  ambitions  had  come  fifteen  years  ago 
out  of  Italy  when  the  news  of  Lewis  the  Pious'  death  was 
brought  to  him,  had  long  found  out  the  vanity  of  human 
wishes  and  the  heavy  burden  of  power.  Of  half  his  rule  he 
had  been  stripped  while  he  still  reigned.  Afcer  he  left  Italy 
fifteen  years  ago  he  had  never  returned  to  it.  His  son  Lewis 
had,  with  the  help  of  the  Pope,  very  soon  contrived  to  edge 
him  out  of  all  power  there.  Truth  to  tell,  Italy,  with  her 
separate  interests  and  her  separate  dangers — with  a  terrible 
cloud  of  Saracen  invaders  hanging  on  her  skirts  —  required 
and  deserved  a  king  living  in  her  midst.  The  policy  of  the 
popes  in  these  days  was,  we  have  already  said,  a  national 
policy,  a  policy  of  Italy  for  the  Italians.  As  Gregory  had 
supported  Lothair  against  his  father,  so  did  Gregory's  suc- 
cessor, Sergius,  support  Lothair's  son  Lewis  against  him ;  and 
this  Lewis,  a  valiant  and  capable  prince,  had  long  been  the 
undisputed  king  of  Italy. 

Now  even  of  the  rest  of  his  empire  Lothair  had  grown 
weary.  We  know  not  what  remorse  of  conscience  may  have 
devoured  him.  Howbeit,  he  now  resigned  his  territories  north 
of  the  Alps  into  the  hands  of  his  second  son,  Lothair,  and  he 
himself  took  the  tonsure  and  retired  into  the  monastery  of 
Priim — the  very  place  to  which  in  his  past  days  of  rebellion 
he  had  once  consigned  his  youngest  brother  Charles.2  There, 
a  few  weeks  later,  he  died. 

When,  after  some  disputes,  the  division  of  the  kingdom  of 

«  Bert,  854.  •  Ann,  Bert.  855,  &c,  (P.  i.    449)< 


THE  FAME  OF  THE  PIRATES.  315 

Lothair  was  finally  settled,  and  his  second  son  succeeded  him 
in  the  northern  part  of  his  territory — which  included  Frisia — 
there  was  again  talk  of  an  alliance  between  the  kings  of  the 
threatened  districts. 

Meantime,  in  the  same  years,  a  change  had  been  taking 
place  in  the  internal  politics  of  Denmark,  which,  if  it  produced 
no  great  effect  upon  the  history  of  the  Vikings  in  Europe,  is  at 
least  memorable  as  almost  the  last  time  in  this  century  that 
the  internal  history  of  Denmark  receives  any  notice  from  the 
Christian  chroniclers. 

IV. 

The  reason  of  this  fact  has  been  already  pointed  out.     That 
.  _  change   was   taking  place   in   the  position    of  the 

A.D.  854.  &  &     .  l 

Viking  wanderers  which  we  described  in  a  former 
chapter,  the  change  from  the  position  of  the  despised  youngest 
son  of  the  Folk-tale  to  the  glorious  hero  of  romance.  The 
Vikings  were  no  longer  the  exiled  younger  brothers  of  the 
Danish  race.  It  was  on  them  now,  and  not  on  the  Danes  of 
the  Fatherland,  that  the  thoughts  of  men  dwelt.  The  fame 
of  their  achievements  abroad  perhaps  made  their  brethren 
impatient  at  home.  A  little  time  ago  the  Viking  expeditions 
had  set  out  under  the  patronage  of  the  Danish  king.  Now 
the  pirate  leaders  had  won  homes  for  themselves  in  the  midst 
of  rich  Christendom  ;  not  yet  territories  (save  in  Frisia), 
but  well-guarded  seats  and,  as  it  were,  watch-towers,  from  which 
they  could  overlook  the  enemies'  lands.  The  more  warlike 
spirits  at  home  looked  with  small  favour  upon  the  new  career 
which  Horik  had  marked  out  for  himself,  since  he  ceased  to 
give  countenance  to  the  Vikings.  They  did  not  care  for  the 
peaceful  road  to  wealth  that  he  was  opening  out  for  them  by 
his  intercourse  with  the  Christians,  with  Anscar,  with  the 
merchants    to   whom    he    threw   open    the   mart  at  Sleswick. 


3 1 6  DEFENCES  BROKEN  DO  IVN. 

Wherefore  an  opposition  party  grew  up  in  Denmark,  at  the 
head  of  which  were  two  nephews  of  Horik,  Harald  and 
Guthorm.  Some  would  have  this  Guthorm  to  be  the  Viking 
leader  who  in  after-years  won  the  kingdom  of  East  Anglia 
from  ^Elfred  the  Great.  But  there  is  nothing  beyond  the 
name  to  identify  the  two.  It  is  more  probable  that  Guthorm 
perished  in  the  battle  which  presently  ensued.  Horik  was 
compelled  to  make  a  partition  of  his  kingdom  with  those 
leaders  of  the  opposition. 

It  may  have  been  through  their  influence  that  in  the  years 
851  and  852  the  great  plundering  expedition  was  organized  to 
s  til  up  the  Elbe,  whereof  mention  has  been  already  made. 
The  rival  powers  in  Denmark  remained  in  a  jealous  equipoise 
for  some  years,  but  in  854  the  flames  of  civil  war  broke  out  in 
full  fury.1  Finally  a  great  battle  was  fought,  lasting  three 
days — comparable  in  duration  to  that  mighty  combat  in  which 
Spain  was  lost  by  the  Goths.  Almost  all  the  royal  house,  it  is 
said,  almost  all  the  nobility  of  Denmark  perished  —  among 
them  Horik  himself,  and  probably  both  his  rivals  Harald  and 
Guthorm.  Only  a  boy  was  found  to  represent  the  blood- 
royal,  and  he  was  raised  to  the  throne  under  the  name  of 
Horik  II.  He  may  have  been  grandson  to  the  first  Horik. 
While  his  guardians  remained  in  power  they  headed  a  party 
opposed  to  any  friendship  with  Lewis  the  German  or  his 
subjects.  The  church  in  Sleswick  was  pulled  down.  But 
later  on  Horik  II.  began,  in  his  turn,  to  make  friends  with 
Archbishop  Anscar,  and  to  the  Christians  in  Sleswick  were 
restored  their  old  liberties. 

Some  of  the  Viking  leaders  were  attracted  by  the  rumours 
of  the  civil  war  at  home.     In  851,  when  the  opposition  party 

1  Ann.  Fuld.  a. a.  ;  Vita.  Anscar.  c.  31.  Rimbert  speaks  of  Horik  being 
attacked  by  pirates.  We  may  perhaps  read  for  this  the  '  Viking  party.' 
But  see  below, 


SECOND  CIVIL   WAR  IN  DENMARK.  317 

first  sprang  into  existence  there,  Rorik  left  his  Frisian  lands, 
in  which  he  had  only  just  been  settled  by  Lothair  the 
emperor,  for  Denmark,  with  the  hope  of  fishing  in  those 
troubled  waters.  But  he  got  no  good  from  that  visit. 
Afterwards  he  and  Godfred  returned  again  to  Denmark,  but 
came  too  late  to  take  any  part  in  the  great  battle,  or  to  put 
in  any  effective  claim  to  the  throne.1  They  were  of  the  blood- 
royal,  of  one  branch  of  it,  as  we  remember.  For  it  was  the 
Horik  who  had  just  fallen  who,  thirty  years  earlier,  ousted 
Harald,  the  brother  or  uncle  of  Rorik  and  the  father  of 
Godfred,  from  the  throne  of  Denmark.  And  certainly  their 
achievements  against  the  subjects  of  Lothair  and  Charles  the 
Bald  might  be  thought  to  entitle  these  Viking  leaders  to  the 
suffrages  of  their  countrymen.  But  though  the  Vikings  ex- 
cited admiration  at  a  distance,  it  may  have  been  found  that 
they  were  too  strange  to  the  every-day  politics  of  their  country, 
too  little  '  in  touch '  with  it,  as  we  should  say,  to  be  able  on 
the  spot  to  win  a  sufficient  body  of  adherents.  Rorik,  how- 
ever, after  a  third  return  to  Denmark,  did  finally  compel 
Horik  II.  to  assign  him  a  large  strip  of  territory  lying  be- ' 
tween  the  Eyder  and  the  sea.2 

Many  other  Viking  leaders  and  followers  were  probably 
attracted   to    Denmark    by   the   civil   war,    for   in 

1  •!•,/-,       AD-  854-6. 

854-5  there  was  a  pause    in   the  violence   of  the 
Northmen's  attacks  in  France. 3 

Internal  affairs,  too,  more  especially  in  West  Francia,  the 
kingdom  of  Charles  the  Bald,  were  going  somewhat  better  for 
the  king.  Pippin  of  Aquitaine  had  fallen  into  Charles's  hands, 
and  had  been  compelled  to  take  the  monastic  habit.*  He 
had,    moreover,    sunk   more    and    more    into    drunken,    dis- 

1  Ann.  Bert.  855.  2  Ann.  Fuld.  857. 

3  Ann.  Xanl.  (Pertz,  ii.  30)    says   in   856:   '  Et  Dani  iierum  resumptis 
viribus?  &C. 

«  Bert.  852  (P.  i.  447)  ;  Regino,  853  (P.  i.  569). 


3 1 8  DEFENCES  BROKEN  DO  WN. 

reputable  ways.1  The  day  was  to  come,  a  year  or  two  hence, 
when  he  would,  breaking  his  vow,  openly  enlist  himself  on 
the  side  of  the  Vikings  and,  so  rumour  said,  forswear  his 
Christianity  as  those  renegades  the  Gaill-Gsedhil  were  doing 
in  Ireland.  The  sentiment  of  the  Frankish  Empire  was  not 
yet  prepared  to  tolerate  such  conduct. 

To  set  against  Pippin's  loss  of  credit,  however,  one  event 
happened  in  the  year  854,  not  so  important  in  itself  as 
ominous  of  future  evil.  The  malcontent  Aquitanians,  losing 
faith  in  their  champion,  Pippin,  began  to  look  elsewhere  for  a 
leader ;  they  began  to  besiege  the  ear  of  Lewis  the  German, 
and  Lewis,  unhappily,  to  pay  some  attention  to  their  com- 
plaints. Lewis  had  hitherto,  of  all  the  three  parties  to  the 
partition  of  Verdun,  been  the  most  zealous  for  the  main- 
tenance of  its  provisions.  That  he  should  now  be  lending  an 
ear  to  those  who  sought  to  induce  him  to  invade  Charles's 
territory  was  ominous  indeed. 

One  can  imagine  excuses  enough  for  those  who  were  eager 
to  be  rid  of  Charles's  rule  and  those  who  listened  to  their 
proposals.  The  battle  with  the  Bretons  near  Rennes,  that 
other  sad  fiasco  by  the  grave  of  Givoldus — these  were  of  evil 
prophecy  for  the  future  years  of  Charles's  rule.  And  had  not 
Charles  intrigued  with  Lewis's  own  enemies,  the  Bulgars  ? 
But  then  the  malcontent  Aquitanians  were  not  in  reality 
thinking  about  the  protection  of  their  country  against  the 
Vikings.  We  shall  see  a  few  years  hence  a  horrible  and 
humiliating  example  of  their  indifference  on  that  head.  They 
were  possessed  only  with  a  wild  longing  for  independence  at 
any  price.  It  had  become  a  mad  idee  fixe  with  them,  for 
which  they  were  prepared  to  sacrifice  everything.  But  that 
Lewis  the  German  should  have  lent  them  any  encouragement — 

*  Like  his  father.     See  Regino,  I.e. 


THE  YOUNGER  LEWIS  IN  AQUITAINE.        319 

this  was  the  sad  and  shameful  fact.  He  did  so.  He  would 
not  indeed  mix  in  the  matter  himself  —  would  not  yet. 
But  he  allowed  his  second  son,  his  aquivocus,  whom  our 
histories  call  (without  much  reason)  Lewis  the  Saxon — he 
allowed  him  to  gather  an  army  and  attempt  the  invasion  of 
Aquitaine.1  It  was  little  more  than  an  attempt.  Charles 
may  not  have  commanded  much  respect,  but  this  new  boy 
commanded  none.  Pippin,  moreover,  escaped  (was  allowed  to 
escape)  from  his  cloister  and  set  up  his  own  claims  ;  so  that  he, 
as  it  were,  divided  the  opposition  party.  Lewis  got  no  follow- 
ing ;  and  on  the  approach  of  his  uncle  he  had  to  retire  once 
more  within  his  father's  territory — his  invasion  a  mere  bubble, 
had  it  not  been  the  forerunner  of  something  much  worse. 
Next  year,  to  gratify  as  far  as  possible  the  Aquitanian  cry  for 
autonomy,  Charles  the  Bald  made  his  son  and  his  cequivocus,  a 
younger  Charles,  independent  or  quasi-independent  king  of 
the  country.  About  this  time,  too,  the  truce  with  the  King 
of  Brittany — king  we  may  fairly  call  him — which  had  been 
wrung  from  Charles  by  Erispoi,  was  confirmed  into  a  more 
durable  peace.  True  it  was  gained  at  the  expense  of  all  for 
which  the  King  of  the  West  Franks  had  been  contending. 
But  with  fresh  clouds  gathering  outside,  peace  at  any  price 
was  worth  obtaining  at  home. 

V. 

Towards  the  end  of  the  year  855  the  Viking  fleets  came 
sweeping   upon  the  coast  of  France  once   more. 

J\.,V),  oOD — O. 

Sihtric  was  here  again :  Sihtric  was  in  the  Loire, 
where   Orleans  again   felt  the  Viking  fury ; 2   he  was  in  the 
Seine.  And  with  him  now  was  associated  a  new  leader,  a  leader 
famous  in  tradition,  Bjorn  Ironside,  the  son  (si  vera  fama)  of 

1  Ann  Fuld.  854  (P.  i.  368-9)  ;  Bert.  (P.  i.  448). 
3  Ann.  Bert,  in  P.  i.  449-451. 


320  DEFENCES  BROKEN  DO  WN. 

Ragnar  Lodbrok.  Sihtric  and  Bjorn  stood  in  command  over  a 
body  of  Vikings  who  were  ravaging  far  and  near  in  the  country 
of  the  Seine  up  to  Pitres.  Charles  encountered  them  at 
La  Perche,  and  there  gained  a  signal  victory.  Sihtric  left 
the  Seine  and  sailed  for  the  Loire.  Bjorn  retreated,  and 
entrenched  himself  at  Givoldi  fossa.  But  next  year  a  still 
stronger  fleet  came  again  up  the  Seine.  Charles — where  was 
he  ?  This  time  the  Vikings  met  with  no  opposition,  or  only 
the  shadow  of  one.  No  monastery  or  town  which  did  not  feel 
the  weight  of  their  attack.  At  last,  burning  and  plundering 
December  on  every  side,  they  sailed  their  slow  course  up  the 
A.D.  856.  river,  and  in  mid- winter  of  856-7  they  made  the 
second  Viking  attack  on  Paris.1  (The  second  Viking  attack 
on  London  had  fallen,  as  we  note,  five  years  earlier.  The 
first  Viking  attack  on  London  had  preceded  the  first  on  Paris 
by  three  or,  maybe,  four  years.)  No  miraculous  arm  was 
stretched  forth  this  time  to  protect  the  city  ;  such  immunity  as 
it  gained  it  owed  to  the  earthly  weapon  of  a  heavy  ransom. 
For  the  sake  of  this  the  Vikings  consented  to  spare  most  of 
the  churches.  But  the  church  of  St.  Peter  and  St.  Paul  was 
devoured  by  flames.  There  lay  the  relics  of  St.  Genevieve, 
who  by  her  miraculous  powers  had  almost  converted  a  heathen 
barbarian  of  the  earlier  invasion  —  Childeric,  the  father  of 
Clovis.  The  church  where  she  lay  occupied  the  site  where 
now  stands  the  Pantheon.  In  the  Loire  the  devastations 
were  as  terrible  as  on  the  Seine.  Tours  was  attacked  a  second 
time.     From  Tours  the  Vikings  ravaged  as  far  as  Blois.s 

A  cry  of  fear  and  anguish  arose  from  these  lands  of  Western 
Fiance.  Scarcely  a  town  (as  we  have  said — they  are  the  very 
words  of  a  chronicler  4),  scarcely  a  monastery,  remained  un- 
touched.    *  All  men  give  themselves  to  flight.     No  one  cries 

1  Ann.  Bert,  in  P.  i.  857.  s  Ibid.  857.  3  Ibid. 

4  Traslat.  S.  Phit'iberti,  ii.  (Mab.  A.SS.  Ssec.  iv.  556). 


PREPARATIONS  FOR  SIEGE  OF  OISSEL.        321 

out,  Stand  and  fight  for  your  fatherland,  for  your  church, 
for  your  countrymen.  What  they  ought  to  defend  with  arms 
they  shamefully  redeem  by  payments.  The  commonweal  of 
Christendom  is  betrayed  by  its  guardians.' 

Such  was  the  state  of  affairs  in  France.     In  Frisia  it  was 
different,  but  scarcely  less  disastrous.     The  year 

J  A.D.  855. 

855,  the   year  of  Lothair's   death,   is  the  one  in 
which  the  Vikings  may  be  said  to  have  established  themselves 
in  Frisia  on  a  permanent  footing.     Henceforth  the  rulers  of 
Lotharingia    seem    pretty    well   to    have    abandoned  the  idea 
of  driving  them  forth  again. 

But  perhaps  Lothair  II.  had  not  really  abandoned  the  idea  ; 
only  that  unaided  he  was  not  equal  to  the  task.     If  he  and 

Charles  could  act  in  concert So  the  treaty  of  offence  and 

defence  which  his  father  had  made  was  renewed.  Charles,  in 
virtue  of  a  curious  power  he  seems  to  have  possessed  of  twist- 
ing people  round  to  his  own  views,  procured  that,  as  on  the 
occasion  of  the  other  joint  attack,  this  should  first  be  directed 
against  Vikings  in  his  own  territory.  The  Seine  Vikings  were 
again  chosen.  After  their  great  expedition  ending  with  the 
second  siege  of  Paris  they  had  returned  down  the  river  and 
settled  themselves  on  their  fortified  island  of  Oissel.  There 
Charles  was  determined  to  besiege  them.  He  spared  no  efforts 
to  make  the  attack  a  decisive  one.  And  had  it  succeeded,  the 
whole  history  of  Viking  invasion  in  the  century  might  have 
been  altered. 

Charles  prepared  not  only  an  army,  but,  what  was  still  too 
rare  a  thing  in  the  Frankish  armaments,  a  fleet. 
No  such  large  one  had  been  seen  before.    Both  sea 
and  land  force  was  set  in  motion  for  the  mouth  of  the  Seine  in 
July,  858.1    The  younger  Charles,  King  of  Aquitaine,  marched 

1  Ann.  Bert.  a.  a.  ;   Vita  S.  Phaivnis  (Mab.  A.SS.  Ssec.  ii.  624). 

22 


322  DEFENCES  BROKEN  DOWN. 

up  with  a  contingent  of  his  own,  and  Lothair  joined  the 
army  in  August.  There  lay  the  Vikings,  shut  in  tightly  in 
their  Oissel  fastness.  But  the  place  could  not  be  taken  by 
assault.  One  does  not  hear  that  the  Franks  even  tried ; 
perhaps  they  had  grown  to  fear  too  much  the  Viking  fortifi- 
cations or  even  their  '  shield-burg.'  So  they  had  to  resort  to 
the  tedious  operations  of  a  blockade,  which  might  give  who 
knows  how  many  openings  to  an  evil  fate.  And  an  evil  fate 
unhappily  stood  at  the  back  of  Charles  the  Bald  and  his 
preparations,  and  was  even  then  at  work. 

At  first  all  went  well.  The  Seine  Danes  found  themselves 
unable  to  break  through  ihe  blockade.  No  friendly  sails 
appeared  on  the  horizon.  They  had  never  been  over-provi- 
dent against  the  evil  day,  and  provisions  soon  began  to  run 
short.  The  siege  had  endured  some  twelve  weeks  :  it  was  not 
possible  for  them  to  hold  out  much  longer. 

But  now  Charles's  ill-fortune  stepped  in  in  the  shape  of  the 
malcontent  nobles  of  his  kingdom — Franks  this  time  as  well 
as  Aquitanians.  While  he  had  been  gathering  his  army  and 
fleet  they  had  been  opening  communications  with  Lewis.1 
And  this  shows  how  little  honesty  there  was  in  their  protests 
that  they  were  only  looking  for  a  fit  defender  for  their  country, 
and  to  how  low  an  ebb  their  patriotism  had  sunk.  Charles 
was,  at  all  events,  more  worthy  than  these  unworthy  vassals. 
But  Lewis  unhappily  listened  once  more  to  their  proposals, 
which  a  certain  Count  Otto  and  Abbot  Adalbert  of  St.  Bertin 
brought  to  him.  He  could  scarcely  be  expected  duly  to  weigh 
the  worth  of  the  negotiators.  The  nobles  painted  the  tyranny 
of  Charles  in  the  blackest  colours ;  they  protested  that  if  Lewis 
could  not  help  them  they  must  throw  themselves  upon  an 
alliance  with  the  Danes.2     Such  a  threat  might  have  given 

x  Ann.  Fuld.  a.a.  ;  Ann.  Bert.  I.e.  Regino,  a.a.  860  (his  dates  being 
wrong  as  usual).  2  Ann.  Field.  I.e. 


LEWIS  THE  GERMAN  INVADES  FRANCE.      323 

the  measure  of  their  honesty.  But  it  was  perhaps  chosen  to 
give  Lewis  a  specious  pretext  for  intervening. 

To  do  so  must  have  been  against  his  conscience.  Moreover 
at  that  moment  every  familiar  call  of  duty  required  his  presence 
elsewhere  than  in  the  midst  of  the  disputes  between  Charles 
and  his  subjects.  For  the  never  more  than  half  smothered 
rebellion  of  his  Slav  tributaries  had  broken  out  into  flame,  and 
the  German  king  was  this  moment  in  the  act  of  arming  a 
triple  expedition — against  Rastislas,  the  Duke  of  Moravia, 
against  the  Sorbs  in  the  middle  district,  and  the  Abodriti  in 
the  north.1  Perhaps  the  very  existence  of  this  ready  prepared 
army  doubled  the  temptation  to  Lewis ;  Charles  engaged  far 
away  in  the  west,  the  whole  road  lay  open.  After,  we  gather, 
paying  his  conscience  the  tribute  of  some  reluctance,2  Lewis 
decided  to  cast  the  die.  In  August,  858,  he  crossed  the 
frontier  and  received  the  homagings  of  a  great  number  of 
the  Frankish  and  Aquitanian  nobility,  but  of  only  one  ecclesi- 
astic of  the  highest  rank,  Wenilo,  the  Archbishop  of  Sens. 

Thereupon  Charles  the  Bald  had  to  raise  the  siege  of  Oissel, 
which  he  had  nearly  brought  to  a  successful  conclusion;  and 
when  all  their  hopes  had  fled  the  Norsemen  saw  themselves 
once  more  left  free. 

Charles  on  his  side  marched  to  encounter  Lewis,  and  the 
two  armies  came  face  to  face  at  Brienne.3 

Both  were  apparently  drawn  up  and  ready  to  do  battle ;  but 
Charles  had  no  serious  thoughts  of  fighting.  Either  his  nerve 
failed  him  or  he  knew  that  his  generals  had  been  tampered 
with/*  After  three  days  of  negotiations,  leaving  his  troops  in 
line,  he  secretly  decamped  and  made  for  Burgundy,s  where  he 
expected  to  find  a  strong  support.  Lewis  marched  forward, 
and  all  West  Francia  seemed  to  lie  at  his  feet. 

1  Ann.  Fuld.  I.e.  a  Ibid.  3  Ann.  Bert.  I.e.;  Ann.  Fuld.  U. 

4  Ann.  Bert.  5  Aquitaine,  according  to  Regino,  s.a.  866. 


324  DEFENCES  BROKEN  DO  WN. 

But  though  the  thanes  fell  from  Charles,  the  ecclesiastics,  all 
save  Wenil©,  stood  by  their  anointed  king.  They  held  a  synod 
at  Quiersey  under  the  presidency  of  Hincmar,  Archbishop  of 
Rheims,  and  head,  as  we  might  call  him,  of  the  Gallican 
Church.1  Under  the  influence  of  that  great  and  undaunted 
man,  the  bishops  and  abbots  at  Quiersey  drew  up  a  letter  of 
remonstrance  and  reproof,  addressed  to  the  victorious  Lewis, 
which  has  a  fine  ring  of  courageous  sincerity  amid  the  treacheries 
and  weaknesses  of  the  time.  They  did  not,  however,  absolutely 
refuse  to  acknowledge  Lewis  as  their  king.  But  before  they 
would  do  so  he  must  obtain  the  abdication  of  Charles  the 
Bald. 

And  in  the  event  this  invasion  came  to  no  more  than  the 
invasion  by  Lewis  the  Saxon.  Some  of  the  nobility  who  had 
been  the  first  to  welcome  Lewis  into  the  western  kingdom,  and 
were  the  most  trusted  by  him,  began  to  intrigue  for  the  return 
of  their  old  king.2  Among  these  was  Count  Conrad  the  Welf, 
the  nephew  of  Judith  the  empress,  and  of  Emma,  the  wife 
of  Lewis  the  German  ;  who,  as  a  relative  both  of  Charles  and 
of  his  rival,  might  not  unnaturally  hesitate  to  whose  side  he 
should  attach  himself.  He  and  his  brother  Hugo — whom  we 
shall  often  hear  of  again — had  been  the  foremost  in  bringing 
over  the  German  king ;  they  were  now  the  foremost  in  bringing 
back  Charles.  We  can  never  understand  the  military  move- 
ments of  those  days,  either  as  between  rival  Christian  princes, 
or  between  the  Christian  troops  and  the  better-organized  North- 
men, unless  we  bear  in  mind  how  temporary  and  militia-like 
was  the  tie  of  service  which  kept  together  the  individuals  of 
the  Christian  armies  \  how  every  ban  or  band  had  a  claim  when 

*  Hincmar,  Op.  ii.  125  sq. 

2  Ann.  Fuld.  I.e. ;  Ann.  Bert.  859  (P.  i.  453) ;  Hincmar,  I.e.  ii.  145- 
158  ;  Regino  I.e.  Regino's  account  shows  that  the  opinion  of  the  clerical 
body  was  against  Lewis. 


BREAKDOWN  OF  OISSEL  SIEGE.  325 

its  work  was  done  to  be  afobanded,  in  order  that  the  private 
soldier  might  return  to  his  plough,  the  great  lord  to  his  villa  or 
his  castle.  This  is  what  happened  now.  Conrad  and  Hugh 
persuaded  Lewis  to  disband  his  troops,  knowing  all  the  time, 
irom  their  secret  communications  with  Charles  the  Bald,  that 
he  had  collected  a  fresh  army  in  Burgundy.  So  that  on  the 
appearance  of  the  latter  at  the  head  of  his  levies,  the  tables  were 
again  turned.  Lewis  was  now  as  little  capable  of  making  head 
against  Charles,  as  Charles  had  thought  himself  incapable  of 
confronting  his  brother  at  Brienne.  At  the  same  time  the  news 
of  hostile  movements  on  the  part  of  the  Sorbs  on  his  eastern 
frontier — the  Sorbs  against  whom  his  army  raised  the  year 
before  ought  to  have  been  turned — gave  Lewis  an  excuse  for 
returning  once  more  from  West  Francia  into  his  own  territory. 

VI. 

Charles  in  this  wise  recovered  his  kingdom.  But  his  great 
effort  against  the  Danes  in  Oissel  had  broken  down — his  last 
serious  effort,  as  it  proved,  to  rid  his  country  altogether  of  this 
new  evil.  Had  this  one  great  camp  been  taken,  and  the 
defenders  driven  from  the  country,  or,  still  better,  had  the 
Vikings  been  destroyed,  it  would  have  been  an  encouragement 
to  the  Christians  all  over  Europe,  and  a  like  discouragement  to 
the  invaders.  There  is  a  curious  parallelism  in  the  history  of 
the  Vikings  on  the  Continent  and  those  in  Eng-    .  _. 

AD  853—4. 

land  just  at  this  time.  Four  or  five  years  before 
Charles'  expedition  against  Oissel,  the  English  j^r^  of  Surrey  and 
Kent  had  been  gathered  together  for  a  strong  attack  upon  the 
camp  of  the  Danes  in  Thanet.1  They  were  under  the  command 
of  their  Ealdormen  Huda  and  Ealhere.  The  English  did  not 
confine  themselves  to  blockading.     They  assaulted  the  Danish 

x  A.  S.  Chron.  s.a. 


326  DEFENCES  BROKEN  DOWN. 

camp  with  desperate  courage.  But  the  Danes  held  out  with  a 
still  more  stubborn  resistance.  When  charge  after  charge  had 
been  made,  and  many  had  fallen  on  both  sides,  the  English 
were  obliged  to  withdraw.  The  English  accounts  speak  of  it 
.  as  a  drawn  battle.      But  if  the  Danes  kept  hold, 

A.D.  855  or  856  . 

as   they    did,  of   their   fortified    camp,    this   was 

everything  to  them.  Two  years  later  they  removed  their 
camp  from  Thanet  to  Sheppey,1  a  little  higher  up  the  river — 
that  is  to  say,  a  little  nearer  to  London.  They  were  now  (as 
appears)  under  the  command  of  three  leaders  who  were  to  be 
famous  in  the  annals  of  the  Danes  in  England — Ingvar  (Ivar), 
Ubbe,  and  Halfdan.  They  are  called  the  sons  of  Ragnar 
Lodbrok.  It  was  about  the  same  time  that  their  brother  Bjorn 
began  to  be  active  in  France. 

But  had  the  siege  of  Oissel  succeeded,  had  the  Danes  been 
compelled  to  surrender,  and  had  Charles  (a  doubtful  hope,  I 
own)  had  the  courage  to  mete  out  to  them  the  full  penalty  they 
deserved,  then  one  cannot  but  think  that  everywhere  the 
Christians  would  have  been  spurred  to  fresh  efforts.  The 
united  Frank ish  armies  might  have  marched  next  upon  the 
Vikings  in  Frisia,  or  those  upon  the  Loire,  and,  encouraged  by 
the  memory  of  their  recent  triumph,  they  would  have  had  every 
hope  of  success  in  either  expedition.  Then  no  doubt  the 
English  would  have  been  roused  to  still  greater  efforts,  and  the 
plague  might  have  been  stayed  for  ever. 

For,  after  all,  it  was  still  in  the  early  stage  :  it  had  not  yet 
lasted  more  than  twenty  years  upon  the  Continent.  We  can- 
not date  the  serious  beginning  of  the  Viking  attacks  upon 
the  Frankish  Empire  before  the  death  of  Lewis  the  Pious,  and 
Lewis  had  yet  been  dead  only  eighteen  years.  Of  isolated  attacks 
from  Denmark  I  am  not  speaking  ;  but  of  the  rise  of  what  may 

"  A.  S.  Chron.  s.a.  855. 


BREAKDOWN  OF  OISSEL  SIEGE.  327 

be  called  a  new  Scandinavian  nation  devoted  to  the  Viking  life, 
and  drawing  all  its  sustenance  from  foreign  countries.  It  is 
the  growth  of  this  new  nationality — a  nation  of  freebooters — 
which  marks  the  culmination,  or,  if  you  prefer  it,  the  true 
beginning  of  the  Viking  Age. 

Of  course  this  is  only  what  might  have  happened,  and  under 
the  most  hopeful  view.  It  is  at  least  as  likely  that  the  Vikings, 
even  if  they  had  been  driven  from  the  Continent,  would  only 
have  turned  with  still  greater  fury  to  England,  and  the  disasters 
which  followed  the  coming  of  the  Great  Army  (of  which  we 
have  to  speak  hereafter)  might  have  been  anticipated  and  sur- 
passed. In  our  country,  as  abroad,  the  Vikings  had  only  begun 
to  fasten  upon  the  land  after  a  series  of  desultory  attacks.  And 
it  is  well  indeed  for  us  that  these  early  attacks  and  settlements 
did  not  sooner  take  the  character  of  a  great  invasion.  For  a 
certain  cetheling  of  England,  son  of  the  reigning  King  ^Ethel- 
wulf,  who,  more  than  any  other  prince  of  the  century,  was  the 
champion  of  Christendom  against  the  heathen,  had  yet  only 
attained  his  tenth  year.  Ten  years  later  when  the  Great 
Invasion  did  fall  upon  England,  it  would  find  this  prince  girt 
with  his  sword,  ready  to  stand  by  the  side  of  his  brother,  the 
king,  in  every  bat  lie  and  every  siege.  Young  as  he  was,  the 
setheling  Alfred  had  already  made  one  or  perhaps  two  journeys 
to  Rome.  On  the  first  visit  he  had  been  anointed  by  Pope 
Leo  IV.,  and  received  by  him  as  his  son.  On  the  second  visit, 
in  855-6,  he  had  accompanied  his  father  ^Ethelwulf,  and  stayed 
for  a  while  at  the  Court  of  Charles  the  Bald.  ^Ethelwulf,  who 
was  a  widower  of  forty,  became  an  aspirant  for  the  hand  of 
Charles's  daughter,  Judith,  a  girl  of  only  fifteen ;  he  married 
her  on  his  return  journey  with  great  ceremony  at  Rheims, 
giving  his  sons  a  stepmother  and  the  English  people  a  '  French 
Madame '  for  queen,  with  which  neither  were  well  content. 
But  this  alliance  of  the  two  crowns  of  West  Francia  and  West 


328  DEFENCES  BROKEN  DO  WN. 

Saxondom  (West-Saex),  at  the  time  when  both  countries  were 
suffering  such  like  treatment  at  the  hands  of  the  Danes  is 
memorable. 

Once  more :  whatever  success  the  Oissel  attack  had  had,  it 
could  not  have  altered  the  condition  of  affairs  further  west, 
where  the  Irish  Sea  coast  was  now  parcelled  out  among  the 
various  Viking  settlements,  and  all  the  country,  Irish  as  well  as 
Norse  or  Danish,  was  in  some  sense  under  the  rule  of  a  king 
from  Norway,  Olaf  the  White ;  nor  in  the  other  countless 
Norse  settlements  in  the  west  and  north  of  Scotland.  Ireland 
and  Scotland  were  for  many  years  left  exclusively  in  the  hands 
of  the  Vikings  from  Norway,  but  in  852  some  Danes  appeared 
upon  the  scene  in  Ireland  in  a  fashion  which  we  shall  describe 
elsewhere.  And  by  this  time  Norse  and  Danes  alike  were 
united  into  a  sort  of  Imperiiim  in  wi_perio,  occupying  the  coast 
settlements  in  Ireland  and  ruled  over  by  King  Olaf  the  White. 

But  it  is  time  to  cease  speculations  on  what  might  have 
happened  if  the  Oissel  siege  had  had  a  different  result,  and  to 
turn  our  attention  upon  the  actual  state  of  things  in  this  year  of 
grace,  859,  as  Charles  was  settling  in  his  recovered  kingdom, 
and  the  Danish  Scalds,  no  doubt,  were  singing  in  the  winter 
camps  upon  the  Seine  or  the  Loire  the  triumph  of  their  arms 
over  the  Christians. 


CHAPTER  XI. 
DEC  A  Y  AND  REDINTEGRATION. 

A.D.   859-866. 
I. 

Time,  we  see,  had  been  slowly  passing  on,  as  the  empire  grew 
weaker  day  by  day  and  the  misery  of  the  people  increased  ; 
and  it  now  marked  seventy  years  since  the  first  Viking 
keel  had  touched  on  English  ground,  sixty-six  since  the  great 
attack  upon  Northumbria  first  roused  the  attention  of  Europe 
and  notified  to  all  men  that  a  new  era  of  history  had  begun. 
A  generation  had  not  passed  since  continuous  Viking  attacks 
first  began  to  fall  heavily  upon  the  states  of  the  Continent. 
But,  in  these  four-and-twenty  years  or  so,  men  had  had 
time  to  drink  almost  to  the  dregs  the  cup  of  sorrow  and 
humiliation  which  the  heathen  had  prepared  for  them.  Now, 
no  doubt,  began  to  rise  up  in  half  the  churches  of  Francia  that 
despairing  petition,  Libera  nos  a  furore  Nor??iannorum  : 
1  From  the  Northmen's  fury  Good  Lord  deliver  us,'  which,  in 
some  churches,  survived  quite  into  modern  days.  Can  anything 
better  express  the  terror  out  of  which  it  grew,  than  the  thought 
of  that  prayer,  continuing  to  be  sent  up  through  all  those 
sumless  days,  for  deliverance  from  a  danger  so  long  past  ? 


33o  DEC  A  V  AND  REDINTEGRA  TION. 

Was  it  possible  for  Christendom  to  sink  much  lower  than  it 
had  done  now,  or  for  the  monarchs  of  the  empire  to  give 
further  proof  of  their  incapacity  for  defending  their  subjects 
against  their  new  oppressors,  or  evidence  of  a  more  fatal  disunion 
among  themselves  ?  And  there  must  have  been  many  alive 
who  could  remember  the  glorious  day  when  Charles  the  Great 
returned  to  Aix  wearing  the  diadem  of  the  Caesars.  They 
could  remember  still  better  the  rage  and  yet  contempt  with 
which  the  Franks  had  heard  of  the  fleet  which  Godfred  dared 
to  hurl  against  an  outlying  portion  of  the  empire  ;  and  Charle- 
magne's angry  complaint  against  Providence,  that  he  had  not 
been  allowed  to  try  the  strength  of  his  arm  against  those  monkeys. 

Yet  here  were  all  their  defences  broken  down,  and  in  the 
lands  of  the  Franks  and  Germans  there  was  an  empire  no 
more.  Some  fiction  of  such  a  state  had  been  kept  up  until 
four  years  ago,  when  Lothair  died.  But  now  it  had  to  be  finally 
abandoned  ;  for  the  only  crowned  emperor  now  was  Lewis  II. — 
Lewis,  the  King  of  Italy,  about  whom  no  one  north  of  the 
Alps  thought  or  cared — a  Frankish  emperor  with  no  Franks  to 
rule. 

This  was  a  change  in  the  whole  state  of  Christendom;  and 
if  it  had  no  direct  bearing  upon  the  doings  of  the  Vikings,  it 
had  certainly  a  moral  significance  in  the  history  of  Europe, 
and  it  was  a  stage  which  we  must  notice  in  the  decay  of  the 
house  of  Charlemagne.  We  know  how  much  the  bringing 
about  this  state  of  things  had  always  lain  at  the  hearts  of  the 
popes. 

Years  ago,  when  Pope  Gregory  died — Gregory  of  the  Ltigen- 

feld — and  Sergius  was  elected  his  successor  by  the  Romans, 

the  new  pope  had  taken  his  seat  upon  the  chair  of  St.  Peter 

without  any  reference  to  the  assent  of  the  emperor.     Lothair  I., 

who  had  then  been  emperor  but  four  years,  sent 

A  D  844.  • 

word  to  his   son    Lewis,   his  viceroy  in   Italy,  to 


CHANGES  IN  THE  EMPIRE.  33! 

collect  an  army  and  march  upon  Rome,  and  to  exact  punish- 
ment  for  this  contempt.  Lewis  did  so  ;  his  troops  invaded 
the  papal  territories,  burning  and  plundering  as  they  passed, 
until  a  terrible  thunderstorm  which  overtook  them  frightened 
the  consciences  of  some,  and  reminded  them  that  they  were 
treading  upon  holy  ground.  They  approached  the  Sacred  City 
in  more  decorous  fashion.  The  pope,  wisely  blind  to  the 
injuries  which  his  servants  and  his  territories  had  suffered, 
came  forward  to  greet  the  young  king,  and  received  him  with 
imperial  honours.  At  the  door  of  St.  Peter's,  however,  he 
refused  Lewis  entrance  to  the  fane  till  he  had  given  his  oath 
that  he  intended  no  injury  to  the  chair  of  Peter  or  to  the 
Roman  State.  And  Lewis  swore  to  protect  both.  This  oath 
grew  presently  into  a  compact  between  the  young  Italian  king 
and  the  pope,  to  the  exclusion  of  the  claims  of  the  emperor. 
Sergius  crowned  Lewis  King  of  Italy,  and  thus  gave  him  a 
title  independent  of  his  father's  choice ;  and  Lewis  confirmed 
the  election  of  Sergius  without  reference  to  the  wishes  of  his 
father,  who  was  by  these  means  practically  ousted  from  all 
future  influence  over  the  government  of  Italy.1 

While  the  bringing  about  of  this  separation  between  Italy 
and  the  empire  north  of  the  Alps  was,  as  we  have  said,  the 
unfailing  policy  of  the  popes,  we  cannot  count  their  aims 
either  unnatural  or  unjust,  seeing  all  the  special  dangers 
which  threatened  the  peninsula,  in  which  the  transalpine  lands 
had  no  share.  It  was  a  policy  which,  for  the- time,  suited  well 
the  interests  of  young  Lewis.  But,  on  his  side,  it  was  a  short- 
sighted policy,  mortgaging  the  power  of  the  imperial  crown  in 
order  to  enjoy  some  of  its  pleasures  while  his  father  lived. 
When,  eleven  years  later,  Lothair  retired  to  the  monastery  at 
Priim,  or  when,  one  month  after,  he  died,  Lewis  felt  the  ill 

1  Gesta  Pont.  Rom.  (Bianchini,  i.  349  sq. );  Ann.  Bert.  a.a.  844  (P.  i. 
440)      The  latter  says  nothing  about  the  hostile  attitude  of  Lewis  at  first 


332  DEC  A  Y  AND  REDINTEGRA  TION. 

effects  of  what  he  had  done.  He  had  kept  Italy  to  himself, 
but  he  had  also  kept  himself  to  Italy.  His  father  could 
revenge  the  slight  of  844  when  in  855  he  handed  over  the 
rule  of  the  northern  countries  to  Lothair,  his  second  son.  And 
when  the  emperor  died,  Lewis  found  it  in  vain  to  put  forward 
his  claims  to  some  part  of  the  territories  his  father  had  ruled 
north  of  the  Alps.  The  two  uncles,  Lewis  the  German  and 
Charles  the  Bald,  sided  with  Lothair  ;  and,  at  the  partition 
of  Orbe,  Lewis  was  formally  excluded  from  any 
part  in  the  government  of  northern  Christendom. 
In  this  wise  Francia  entered  upon  a  distinct  stage  in  the 
course  of  its  decay.  Now  a  still  more  serious  downward  step 
had  been  taken  in  the  revival  of  the  civil  war  by  Lewis  in  858, 
teaching  a  memorable  lesson  of  the  overweening  influence  of 
personal  ambition  upon  the  policy  of  these  sons  of  Lewis  the 
Pious,  above  any  care  they  had  for  their  own  states  or  the 
welfare  of  Christendom.  For  Lewis,  we  remember,  had,  at 
the"  moment  of  invading  Charles's  kingdom,  laid  aside  the 
schemes  (legitimate  schemes  they  would  be  deemed  in  that 
day)  which  he  had  been  maturing  to  rivet  again  the  yoke  of 
the  Franks  upon  his  eastern  neighbours  the  Slavs.1  It  might 
seem  a  judgment  that  from  this  time  to  the  end  of  his  long 
reign  that  yoke  was  never  more  maintained  by  Lewis.2  The 
wars  with  the  Slavs  henceforth  never  died  down.  At  the  head 
of  the  hostile  confederation  stood  the  Moravian  Duke  Ras- 
tislas.  He  was  defeated  from  time  to  time,  often  his  territory 
was  wasted  ;  but  his  submission  was  never  won.  For  many 
years  Rastislas  kept  alight  the  fire  of  revolt :  when 

A.D  870  . 

he  died,  his   successor,  his  nephew,  Suatopluk  or 

1  Gfrorer  holds  that  the  assembly  of  an  army  against  the  Slavs  was  only 
a  pretence,  O.  u.   IV.  Fr.  Carol,  i.  269. 

2  It  was  to  a  certain  extent  restored  after  A.D.  862.  The  years  855-862 
may  be  reckoned  those  of  the  complete  independence  of  Moravia.  See 
Gfrorer  o.c.  pp.  197,  450. 


CHANGES  IN  THE  EMPIRE.  333 

Zwentibold,  though  he  had  allied  himself  with  the  Franks 
against  Rastislas,  and  though  for  a  moment  he  seemed  to 
submit  to  their  dictation,  soon  returned  to  his  uncle's  ambitious 
dreams  and  became  unconquerable  and  independent  as  Rastis- 
las had  been. 

We  note,  too,  as  another  mark  of  decadence,  the  new 
partition  of  the  empire,  by  the  division  of  all  the  land,  once 
ruled  over  by  Lothair  the  Emperor,  among  his  three  sons, 
Lewis,  Lothair,  and  Charles ;  the  diminution  or  partition  of 
the  kingdom  of  Charles  the  Bald,  by  the  introduction  of  home 
rule  into  Aquitaine,  and  by  the  total  independence  of  Brittany. 
Even  the  Eastern  kingdom  felt  the  touch  of  the  same  centri- 
fugal forces.  Lewis  the  German,  had  to  taste  of  the  dish 
which  he  had  helped  to  prepare  for  his  father.  He,  in  his  turn, 
experienced  the  turbulence  and  insubordination  of  his  own 
sons.  His  strong  hand  held  them  down  and  prevented  the 
outbreak  of  civil  war;  but  their  mutual  jealousies — chiefly  the 
jealousy  of  the  second  son  Lewis  of  the  first-born  Carloman 
— were  always  smouldering,  and  once  or  twice  during  their 
father's  lifetime  they  burst  into  flame. 

Add  to  all  these  internal  sources  of  weakness  the  fresh  spirit 
that  was  put  into  the  Northmen  by  the  breakdown  of  the 
Oissel  siege.  Everywhere  there  was  depression  among  the 
Christians  and  exaltation  among  the  Vikings.  Fresh  fleets 
poured  upon  the  Frankish  coasts  ;  leaser  rivers  like  the  Scheld 
and  the  Somme  began  to  receive  their  colonies  of  Vikings,  not 
less  than  the  greater  ones,  the  Rhine  and  the  Seine  and  the 
Loire. 

The  two  high  contracting  parties  in  the  alliance  which  had 
led  to  the  Oissel  siege  drew  off,  each  on  his  own  business, 
really  giving  up  in  their  thoughts  the  no'ion  of  any  great  efforts 
in  the  future  against  the  Danes.  The  second  Lothair,  who  was 
a  feeble   edition   of  his    father,   soon    became   involved    in  a 


334  DEC  A  Y  AND  REDINTEGRA  TION. 

matrimonial  difficulty,  the  cause  celebre  of  those  days,  which 
lay  very  near  his  heart,  which  was  much  more  to  him  than  all 
his  kingly  duties ;  and,  indeed,  all  Europe  was  agape  about  the 
matter,  as  if  it  had  nothing  more  serious  to  concern  itself  with 
than  the  question  of  the  legality  of  a  royal  marriage.  Could 
not  Hincmar,  the  greatest  ecclesiastic  of  his  day  north  of  the 
Alps,  the  guiding  spirit  in  the  policy  of  Charles  the  Bald,  find 
subject  more  pressing  to  the  interests  of  his  countrymen  than 
to  discuss  whether  Lothair  was  rightly  married  to  his  wife, 
Thietberga,  or  no ;  or  what  means  were  to  be  taken  to  force  him 
to  give  up  his  mistress,  Waldrada,  and  take  back  his  lawful 
spouse  ?  Could  Hincmar  have  looked  forward  another  quarter 
of  a  century  and  seen  the  Viking  armies  encamped  round  his 
own  beloved  Rheims,  himself,  an  archbishop  old  and  grey, 
fleeing  before  them  by  night — could  he  have  seen  these  sights, 
would  he  not  have  thought  there  were  matters  more  weighty 
than  even  a  royal  divorce  suit?  Yet  there  were  things  not  less 
terrible  being  enacted  before  his  eyes,  though  neither  he  nor 
Rheims  were  yet  the  sufferers.  Had  not  one  body  of  Vikings, 
the  very  year  of  the  Oissel  siege,  come  to  Bayeux  and  slain  its 
bishop,  Bishop  Baltfrid  ?  and  at  the  beginning  of 
859  killed  another  bishop,  Erminfrid  of  Beauvais, 
and  carried  off  Immo,  Bishop  of  Noyon,  a  prisoner?  * 

Charles,  not  less  than  Lothair,  seems  to  have  abandoned  the 
thought  of  driving  the  Vikings  away  by  steady  open  war; 
though  he  did  not,  like  his  nephew,  sit  down  and  do  nothing, 
or  concern  himself  only  with  domestic  affairs.  Yet,  if  the 
Vikings  were  too  strong  to  be  openly  attacked,  what  other 
resource  was  there?  -  For  one  answer  to  the  question  let  us 
turn  aside  for  a  moment  from  the  Frankish  embroilments,  and 
look  far  away  over  to  the  Western  Island,  which  we  have  lost 

1  4nn.  Bert.  859, 


DANES  ATTACK  NORSEMEN.  335 

sight  of  so  long ;  not,  indeed,  for  the  sake  of  taking  up  the 
continuous  history  of  the  Vikings  in  Ireland  again — for  the 
history  is  at  once  too  monotonous  and  meagre  to  be  unfolded  in 
detail — but  only  to  witness  one  event  which  happens  to  stand 
out  of  these  barren  chronicles  like  an  oasis  of  graphic  and 
realizable  description. 

II. 

It  was  in  851.  What  the  Gaill  had  been  doing  in  Ireland 
up  to  85 1  we  have,  perhaps,  by  this  time  nearly 
forgotten.  It  was  '  the  fifth  year  of  Malachy,'  for 
one  thing — Malachy  whom,  if  we  remember  anything,  we 
recall  as  the  slayer  of  Thorgisl  in  845,  and  the  year  after 
raised  to  the  Ard-Ri-ship,  or  throne  of  all  Ireland,  as  Malachy  I. 
Malachy  had  now  been  Ard-Ri  for  four  or  five  years,  when, 
one  summer's  morning  of  851,  the  'sea-ward'  of  the  Vikings 
in  Dublin,  looking  out  to  sea,  beheld  a  great  fleet  hanging  in 
the  clouds.  The  Norsemen  were  filled  with  panic  (it  is  an 
Irish  chronicler  who  writes).1  Some,  however,  said  that  the 
fleet  was  a  fleet  of  Norsemen  who  were  coming  to  their  aid  ; 
but  others,  who  had  more  knowledge,  said  that  these  ships 
were  the  ships  of  the  Daunites,  or  Danes,  who  were  coming  to 
rob  and  plunder  them  ;  and  this  was  in  fact  the  truth. 

It  is  a  new  departure  in  Viking  history,  this  turning  of  the 
arms  of  one  nation  of  sea-rovers  against  those  of  another, 
instead  of  fleshing  them  upon  the  common  Christian  enemy — 
the  corpus  vile  of  the  Christian  peasant  or  monk. 

The  chronicler  goes  on  to  tell  us  how  the  Dublin  Norsemen 
sent  a  very  swift-sailing  vessel  towards  the  approaching  fleet. 

1  O'Donovan,  Three  Fragments  [copied  from  ancient  sources  by 
McFirbisigh],  from  which  the  whole  of  the  following  account  is  taken. 
For  confirmation,  however,  cf.  Chron.  Scot.  ;  F.  M.  850 ;  Gaill.  xx.  ; 
Ult.  850-1.  On  the  superiority  of  Danes  over  other  Scandinavians,  cf. 
Ann.  Xant. 


336  DEC  A  Y  AND  REDINTEGRA  TION. 

And,  amid  the  barrenness  of  all  Viking  records,  it  is  not,  I  own, 
without  keen  pleasure  that  I  watch  that  single  vessel  scudding 
and  tacking  on  its  momentous  errand,  watched  eagerly  over  the 
Dublin  Bay,  while  the  threatening  ■  Daunite  '  fleet  grows  larger 
and  larger  to  view.  At  last  the  swift  vessel  has  come  up  to  the 
foremost  of  the  new  fleet  and  the  two  ships  meet  'face  to  face.' 
The  helmsman  "  of  the  Norseman  addressed  the  helmsman  of 
the  Dane  in  words  not  much  different  from  those  which  of  old 
time  were  spoken  by  Polyphemus  to  the  wandering  Odysseus, 
and  his  comrades.  '  Ye,  oh  !  men,  from  what  country  are  ye 
come  upon  the  sea  ?  Come  ye  for  peace  or  for  war  ?  '  2  But 
the  only  answer  which  the  Dane  vouchsafed  was  to  let  fly  a 
shower  of  arrows.  The  crews  of  the  two  ships  at  once  en- 
gaged ;  and  the  crew  of  the  Danish  ship  overcame  the  crew  of 
the  Norseman,  and  the  Danes  slew  the  crew  of  the  Norse  ship. 
The  Danish  fleet  then  all  together  made  for  the  place  where 
lay  the  Norwegian  ships  and  ran  towards  the  shore.  A  fierce 
battle  was  fought.  The  Danes  slew  thrice  their  own  number  of 
Norsemen  and  they  cut  off  the  heads  of  all  they  slew.  The 
Danes  then  convoyed  the  ships  of  the  Norsemen  along  to  a 
fort ;  and  they  took  the  women  and  the  gold  and  all  the 
property  of  the  Norsemen  with  them.  '  And  thus,'  concludes 
our  chronicler,  '  the  Lord  took  away  from  the  Norsemen  all 
the  wealth  that  they  had  stolen  from  the  churches  and  the 
sanctuaries  and  the  shrines  of  the  saints  of  Erin  ! ' 

But  two  Norse  chiefs — Stein  and  Jargna  were  their  names — 
on  intelligence  of  the  defeat  of  the  Dublin  Vikings  set  about 
great  preparations  for  revenge.  They  made  a  great  hosting 
from  every  quarter  against  the  Danes,  and  came  at  last  with 

1  The  Norse  word  stiurusman  is  used  by  the  Irish  chronicler.  He  was 
not  merely  the  helmsman  but  the  captain  of  the  ship. 

a  T2  Z&voi  rivfg  tork  ;    woQev  7rXt?#'  vypa  KkXevQa  \ 
r\  ti  Kara  irprfiiv  i)  ftxttyih'uaQ  a\d\r)o9et 
dia  -e  \r)io-i)pe(;  vrrtip  tiXa  ;  .  ,  , 


BATTLE  OF  CARLINGFORD  LOUGH,  337 

a  fleet  of  seventy  sail  to  beat  them  up  in  Carlingford  Bay  where 
they  were  stationed.  The  Danish  fleet  was  much  smaller,  not 
comparable,  therefore,  to  some  of  the  great  fleets  which  we 
have  seen  hurled  against  the  shores  of  France  or  England. 

All  day  it  seems  the  two  fleets  fought,  the  Norsemen  and 
the  Danes ;  and  there  had  never  been  seen  before  so  great  a 
slaughter  at  sea  as  took  place  between  them.  But  victory 
turned  against  the  Danes.  They  were  cut  off  from  their 
supplies  of  food,  and  were  like  to  perish  of  hunger. 

Then  their  leader,  Horm,1  made  them  a  long  speech,  which 
the  chronicler  reports  to  us.  The  last  words  alone  are  worth 
notice — 'And  here  is  a  further  counsel  of  mine  to  you. 
This  St.  Patrick,  against  whom  these  enemies  of  ours  have 
done  so  many  injuries,  is  archbishop  and  head  of  the  saints  of 
Erin.  Let  us,  then,  pray  fervently  to  him  for  victory  and 
triumph  over  our  enemies.'  They  all  answered — *  Let  our  pro- 
tector,' they  said,  '  be  the  holy  Patrick,  and  the  God  who  is 
Lord  over  him  also ;  and  let  our  spoils  and  our  wealth  be  given 
to  his  Church.'  Then  they  went  *  unanimously  and  bravely 
and  manfully  '  against  the  Norsemen  and  gave  battle. 

It  sounds  rather  apocryphal  certainly,  all  this  about  praying 
to  St.  Patrick,  and  to  the  God  who  is  Lord  of  him  also,  and 
giving  gifts  to  his  Church.  But,  at  any  rate,  from  such  preface 
we  can  guess  the  issue.  '  The  whizzing  of  darts,  the  clash  of 
shields,  the  groans  of  wounded  and  dying  filled  the  air.  But 
though  it  was  long,  in  the  end  the  Norsemen  were  defeated, 
and  the  Danes  gained  the  victory  and  the  glory  of  that  day, 
through  the  protection  of  St.  Patrick,  albeit  the  Norsemen 
were  three  or  four  times  their  number.' 

Then  follows  a  scene,  ghastly  but  graphic  enough,  showing 

1  Orm  ?  The  Orm  of  the  Orme's  Head  in  Carnarvon  probably.  Unless 
we  should  read  Horn,  as  Anlaf  becomes  Amlaiph  in  Irish. 

23 


338  DEC  A  Y  AND  REDINTEGRA  TION. 

the  Danes  after  their  victory  roasting  their  supper  on  land,  the 
spits  (or  spears  for  spits)  stuck  in  the  bodies  of  slain  Norse- 
men. And  then  this  fragment  of  our  chronicle  comes  to  an 
end,  and  we  have  to  return  to  the  monotonous  calendars. 
'  This  year  the  Gaill  and  the  Gaedhil  fought  at ; '  with- 
out detail  or  distinction  between  one  raid  or  battle  and  another. 


III. 

Turn  back  again  to  France.  Charles  the  Bald  knew  nothing 
of  the  doings  of  Danes  or  Norsemen  in  Ireland,  and  there  were 
not  upon  his  coasts  two  nations  who  could  be  pitted  one  against 
the  other.  Nevertheless  his  policy  turned  somewhat  in  this 
direction.  He  sought  to  use  the  Danes  of  one  settlement 
against  the  Danes  of  another,  to  bribe  the  Vikings  of  the 
Somme  to  attack  the  Vikings  of  the  Seine.  It  was  not  a  very 
honourable  policy,  but  it  was  one  of  the  means  to  which  he 
had  to  resort ;  part  of  a  slow  and  stubborn  resistance  in  detail, 
a  constant  combating  from  point  to  point  which  marked  his 
dealings  with  the  Vikings  for  long  years  henceforth— an  in- 
glorious Fabian  policy,  but  not  without  its  effect  in  the  end. 

Other  means  which  Charles  employed — part,  they  also, 
of  the  machinery  of  the  same  system — were  more  worthy. 
Charles  had  military  instinct  enough  to  see  the  necessity  of 
improving  his  cavalry  arm.  The  Danes  themselves  had  long 
made  good  use  of  horses,  but  chiefly  for  the  sake  of  transport. 
On  horses — a  mounted  infantry,  or  even  as  I  have  said  a  sort 
of  horse-marines — when  away  from  their  ships  they  scoured 
the  country.  Half  their  success  was  due  to  the  rapidity  of 
their  movements.  Charles  sought  to  meet  them  by  developing 
a  regular  cavalry.     A  decree  of  his    passed   in  these  years1 

«  Council  of  Pitres,  c.  26,  Pertz,  leg.  i.  494. 


CHARLES'  MEANS  OF  DEFENCE.  339 

ordained  that  every  man  whose  holding  was  of  a  certain  value 
should  come  into  the  field  on  horseback ;  this  decree  is 
counted  by  military  historians  as  the  veritable  institution  of 
the  man-at-arms  of  the  Middle  Ages — the  type  of  soldier  who 
held  the  field  as  by  far  the  most  important  contingent  in  any 
army  until  the  victories  of  the  Swiss  infantry  over  the  troops 
of  Burgundy  and  Milan  at  the  beginning  of  the  Renaissance 
Era,  once  more  gave  a  superior  importance  to  infantry,  which 
the  improvement  in  arms  of  precision  finally  secured  to  it. 

A  third  means  adopted  by  Charles  against  the  Vikings 
was  the  building  of  fortified  bridges  on  the  rivers  to  bar  the 
passage  against  Danish  fleets.  A  very  obvious  means,  it 
mi^ht  be  said.  Bat  in  the  first  place  the  art  of  fortification 
had  been  very  little  cultivated  of  recent  years.  It  would 
almost  seem  as  if  in  this  matter  the  Christians  took  lessons 
from  the  heathens ;  for  the  Vikings  had  long  been  in  the 
habit  of  making  themselves  fortified  camps.  We  do  not  know 
the  methods  of  military  architecture  which  they  employed, 
but  they  succeeded  in  making  their  camps  practically  im- 
pregnable— as  was  proved  in  the  case  of  the  Oissel  siege. 

At  first  the  Christians  were  afraid  to  possess  strong  places 
for  fear  they  should  fall  into  the  hands  of  the  enemy,  and  an 
order  was  made  to  destroy  the  old  remains  of  Roman 
camps  for  this  very  reason.1  Now,  however,  Charles  began 
the  fortification  of  some  of  the  rivers — very  tentatively  at  first. 
The  first  place  in  which  Charles  tried  this  new  method  of  war- 
fare was  Pitres,  a  point  on  the  Seine  a  little  above  the  great 
Danish  camp  of  Oissel.  On  this  the  works  at  Pitres  were 
designed,  no  doubt,  as  a  sort  of  post  of  observation.     Pitres 

1  But  also  because  they  w^re  nesls  of  robbers  and  for  the  encouroge- 
ment  which  they  gave  to  insubordination  among  the  vassals  of  the  kingdom. 
See  Edict  of  Pitres,  cap.  y] . 


340  DEC  A  Y  AND  REDINTEGRA  TION. 

lay,  moreover,  close  to  the  junction  of  the  two  rivers,  the 
Eure  and  the  Andelle,  with  the  Seine,  and  so  barred  the  ascent 
of  all  three  streams.  At  the  first  meeting  of  a  general  council 
at  Pitres  in  862  the  works  had  already  been  begun,  and 
Charles  urged  on  the  nobility  of  the  neighbourhood  the 
necessity  of  prosecuting  them  with  vigour.  In  864,  at  the 
second  council,  they  were  thought  to  be  complete.  They  had 
some  effect  in  deterring  Viking  raids.  But  of  far  greater  im- 
portance, as  they  were  to  prove  twenty  years  later,  were  the 
defensive  works  which  Charles  set  on  foot  at  Paris,  building 
two  bridges  from  the  Paris  island  across  the  Seine  to  bar 
ingress  up  that  water-way  into  the  centre  of  France. 

It  was  a  wretched  thing  that  the  guardians  of  the  great 
Frankish  Empire  should  have  to  resort  to  such  mere  dilatory 
expedients  to  save  the  land  from  the  attacks  of  raw  northern 
barbarians.  Could  any  one  in  the  days  of  Charlemagne  have 
conceived  that  the  kingdom  which  he  and  his  ancestors  had 
built  up — nay,  that  the  unconquered  race  of  the  Franks  them- 
selves— would  have  been,  in  little  more  than  half  a  century, 
trembling  and  hiding,  or  dodging,  so  to  say,  behind  their 
fortifications,  bringing  cunning  to  bear  instead  of  strength,  by 
setting  one  Viking  host  against  another?  Yet,  as  under  all 
forms  of  decay  there  exist  likewise  the  germs  of  new  life, 
though  life  of  a  different  kind  maybe,  so  here,  doubtless, 
Nature  had  not  gone  to  sleep,  but  was  in  her  own  way  fashion- 
ing something  out  of  what  had  once  been  the  mighty  power  of 
the  Franks ;  a  something  to  which  we  have  no  right  yet  to 
give  a  name,  for  it  is  as  yet  but  an  embryo.  I  will  not  take 
upon  myself  even  to  describe  what  that  something  was,  only 
to  recognize,  when  I  see  them,  some  of  the  processes  which 
were  bringing  it  into  existence. 

For  the  peasants  of  this  age  it  was  an  evil  time.     Charles's 


CONDITION  OF  PEASANTRY.  341 

schemes  for  protecting  the  country,  whatever  they  may  have 
been  worth,  were  of  too  general  a  kind  to  take  much  account 
of  individual  cases.  Isolated  instances  of  suffering,  single 
instances  repeated  a  hundred  times,  were  of  small  consequence 
so  long  as  an  appearance  of  kingship  could  be  maintained. 
When  those  strandhogs  were  going  on,  and  burning  cottages 
reddened  the  sky,  the  king  looked  away.  He  did  indeed 
make  some  decrees  during  this  period  which  were  designed  to 
relieve  the  obligations  of  those  peasants  who,  through  Viking 
ravages,  might  be  driven  from  their  homes  and  compelled  to 
fail  in  their  duties  to  their  lords.1 

Their  lords  were  restrained  from  exacting  the  service  which 
they  could  not  pay.  But  who  was  to  restore  them  what  they 
had  lost?  Where  was  the  lord  whose  duty  it  was  to  defend 
them  from  such  ravages  ? 

Once — it  was  in  858 — some  of  the  Aquitanian  peasants, 
driven  to  frenzy  by  the  Viking  cruelties,  rose  up  in  the  mere 
courage  of  despair,  like  sheep  turning  upon  wolves,  and  did 
actually  succeed  in  gaining  the  better  of  their  spoilers.  But 
the  nobles  grew  alarmed  at  the  sight  of  such  independence, 
and  siding  with  their  adversaries,  with  the  heathen  invaders, 
against  their  own  people,  drove  these  back  into  their  kennels 
again — a  shameful  sight,  the  saddest  in  all  the  history  of  that 
sad  century.  One  may  well  fancy  that  some  of  the  stronger 
and  bolder  and  wilder  of  the  peasantry  would  rather  throw  in 
their  lot  with  the  enemy  than  any  longer  serve  such  masters. 
There  at  least  they  found  a  carriere  ouverte  aux  talents — to 
talents  such  as  they  possessed,  a  strong  arm,  a  lion's  courage, 
and  the  ferocity  of  wolves.  There  must  be  some  foundation 
for  the  stories  of  famous  Viking  leaders  who  had  once  been 
Christian  peasants — of  Aquitaine,  or  wherever  it  might  be — 

*  Edict  of  Pit  res,  Pertz,  Leges  %  i.  488  sqq. 


342  DEC  A  Y  AND  REDINTEGRA  TION. 

and,  like  the  Gaill-Gaedhil  of  Ireland,  had  foresworn  their 
country  and  their  God,  and  joined  their  fortunes  with  the 
enemies  of  both.  Such,  according  to  one  story,  was  the 
origin  of  the  thrice-famous  Hasting.  He,  so  went  the  tale, 
had  once  been  a  simple  peasant  of  Aquitaine. 

But,  without  apostacy  to  a  man's  religion  or  treachery  to 
his  country,  there  was  a  career  open  to  the  fortunate  brave 
of  any  rank ;  or  how  should  that  story  have  arisen  which 
made  the  ancestor  of  the  succeeding  royal  house  of  France 
a  beccaio  di  Parigi,  a  butcher  of  Paris,  as  Dante  calls  Robert 
the  Strong?  In  his  case  the  myth  is  utterly  untrue.  But 
no  doubt  it  represents  many  a  true  history  of  the  brave  and 
successful  men  of  those  times.  Many  great  families  had 
their  origin  in  these  days  of  turmoil.  We  can  find  the 
father  of  Robert  the  Strong,  but  we  cannot  find  him  a  grand- 
father. Of  another  champion  of  these  days,  Baldwin  of  the 
Iron  Arm,  the  king's  Forester  and  Count  of  Flanders,  and 
eventually  his  son-in-law,  I  do  not  know  that  we  can  even  find 
the  father.  This  is  the  compensation  which  Nature  makes  us 
for  an  era  of  revolution,  which  must  also  needs  be  an  era  of 
decay,  this  carriere  onverte  aux  talents,  this  rise  of  fresh  blood 
to  enforce  the  feeble  current  of  the  old.  First  of  all  the 
germinal  processes  which  were  going  on  now  I  place  this  rise 
of  great  men,  new  men,  the  ancestors  of  famous  houses,  men 
without  ancestors  of  their  own. 

Everywhere,  whether  they  were  new  men  or  old,  the  vassals 
of  the  Crown  were  growing  into  independence.  How  could  it 
be  otherwise,  when  the  prestige  of  the  kingly  rank — nay,  what 
was  still  more  weighty,  the  prestige  of  the  Carling  name — 
had  fallen  so  low  ?  Everywhere,  in  all  parts  of  the  empire, 
as  by  a  necessary  natural  process,  we  see  the  same  thing  going 
on — the  rise  of  great  houses.  Only  in  France — in  Charles's 
kingdom — where   the    Frankish  and    the  Carling    names  had 


RISE  OF  NEW  HOUSES.     THE  WELFINGS.     343 

fallen  so  much  the  most,  the  process  is  more  revolutionary, 
the  rise  is  more  sudden,  there  are  more  new  men.  Elsewhere 
it  is  chiefly  that  houses  already  famous  gain  vastly  in  import- 
ance and  power. 

IV. 

Great  already  was  the  family  from  which  the  late  Empress 
Dowager  Judith  came,  the  family  of  Count  Welf  the  Bavarian. 
Two  of  the  daughters  of  that  Count  Welf  married  into  the 
royal  Carling  House,  the  Empress  Judith  for  one,  Emma,  her 
sister,  for  another;  she  married  Lewis  the  German,  so  that 
this  last  was  his  own  father's  brother-in-law.  He  was  Charles 
the  Bald's  uncle-in-law  and  half-brother.  The  sons  of  Welf 
were  two,  Rudolf  and  Conrad.  Conrad  had  for  children 
a  second  Conrad  and  Hugo,  both  of  whom  we  have  seen 
taking  conspicuous  parts  in  the  drama  of  Lewis  the  German's 
instalment  as  ruler  of  West  Francia  in  858,  and  his  expulsion 
the  following  year.  The  second  Conrad  had  as  son  another 
Rudolf,  whom  we  shall  see  long  hence  rising  to  kingly  honours 
upon  the  ruins  of  the  empire.1  These  Welfs  were  illustrious 
by  their  connections,  for  they  were  related  in  many  different 
ways  to  all  the  kings  of  the  Carling  House  ;  through  their  two 
aunts  in  the  way  we  have  seen  \  through  their  mother,  Adelis 
or  Adelais,  they  were  cousins  to  the  Emperor  Lewis  II.  and  to 
Lothair  II.  But  these  Welfings  were  even  more  illustrious  by 
their  own  achievements,  especially  the  second  of  them,  Abbot 
Hugh.  Their  varied  relationships  might  well  make  them  of  a 
somewhat  doubtful  allegiance.  Two  of  them,  we  have  just 
said,  were  at  first  among  the  leaders  of  the  party  which  invited 
Lewis  the  German  into  West  Francia ;  and  almost  directly 
after  his  invasion  they  began  to  scheme  for  the  restoration  of 

1  There  was  a  third  Conrad,  son  of  the  elder  Rudolf,  likewise  a  con- 
spicuous figure  in  these  days. 


344  DEC  A  Y  AND  REDINTEGRA  TION. 

Charles.  But  by  more  honourable  means  also  they  rose  to 
power.  Hugh  became  in  later  years  the  chosen  successor  o 
Robert  the  Strong,  in  his  abbey  of  Marmoutiers  and  his 
county  of  Anjou  ;  that  is  to  say,  he  became  the  guardian  of  the 
Breton  marches  against  the  Bretons,  as  well  as  the  defender  of 
the  Fatherland  against  the  ceaseless  and  most  dangerous 
attacks  of  the  Loire  Danes. 

It  was  when  the  Danes  were  allied  with  the  Bretons  that 
they  became  most  threatening.  This  Abbot  Hugh  lived  long. 
He  became,  after  the  death  of  Charles  the  Bald,  almost  a 
regent  of  the  kingdom,  and  redeemed  early  days  of  treachery, 
or  something  like  it,  by  a  long  and  faithful  service  to  the 
Western  Carling  House. 

Saxony  never  received  its  due  share  of  attention  from  Lewis 
the  German,  who  was  to  the  end  hoch-deutsch  in  all  his  tastes 
and  associations.  He  had  ruled  his  Bavarian  kingdom  long 
before  he  received  his  nieder-deutsch  territories,  and  his 
thoughts  centred  round  his  first  subjects.  Their  neglect  at 
the  hands  of  Lewis  necessarily  led  the  Saxons  to  look  the 
more  to  the  nobility  of  their  own  stock.  Of  these  by  far  the 
greatest  was  the  house  whose  representatives  were  two  counts 
of  Lewis's  Court,  Count  Cobbo  and  Count  Liudolf.  They 
were  of  an  ancient  Saxon  family,  whose  genealogy  went  back 
into  the  days  of  heathenism  and  freedom.  Of  these  two 
brothers,  who  belong  to  the  history  of  this  time,  we  have 
already  seen  Count  Cobbo  sent  as  ambassador  to  Horik,  King 
of  Denmark,  what  time  Ragnar  returned  laden  with  booty  and 
with  sickness  from  his  Paris  raid.  Cobbo  was  used  to  offices 
of  high  trust ;  he  had  been,  for  example,  one  of  Lewis's 
plenipotentiaries  in  discussing  the  preliminaries  to  the  Treaty 
of  Verdun.  Though  Cobbo  and  Liudolf  could  look  back  to 
the   time   when    their   ancestors    had    borne   rule  among   the 


THE  LIUDOLFINGS.  345 

independent  Saxons,1  there  was  no  taint  of  stetlinga-rebQldom 
about  them.  They  had  no  heathen  leanings.  Both  were 
strong  Churchmen,  counted  (no  small  advantage  in  those 
days)  more  than  one  female  saint  among  their  kin,  were  them- 
selves liberal  endowers  of  churches  and  monasteries,3  and  not 
the  less  brave  and  successful  soldiers.  Through  the  in- 
difference of  Lewis  the  German  to  Saxon  affairs,  Liudolf, 
after  he  had  succeeded  his  brother,  became  almost  a  king  in 
Saxony.  To  him  was  confided  the  task  of  guarding  the 
Danish  mark,  as  well  as  of  protecting  the  north-eastern 
frontiers  of  the  kingdom  against  the  Slavs.  Like  the  illus- 
trious Welf  family  in  the  west,  these  Saxon  counts  were  allied 
to  the  royal  house  :  allied  through  the  marriage  of  the  second 
Lewis,  Lewis  the  Saxon — so-called — with  Liudolf  s  daughter, 
Liutgard.  Liudolf  died  (a.d.  866)  with  the  title — only  borne 
by  the  first  noblemen  of  the  realm — of  dux  Saxonum,  Duke  of 
the  Saxons. 

But  this  Saxon  duke  was  more  famous  in  his  descendants 
than  in  himself.  He  had  two  sons,  Bruno  and  Otto.  The 
former  succeeded  him  in  his  duchy,  but  was  killed,  as  appears, 
when  leading  his  Saxons  against  the  Danes  in  a  great  battle 
on  Luneburg  Heath  in  the  year  880.  Otto  succeeded,  and 
held  the  duchy  from  880  to  the  year  912.  He  added 
Thuringia  to  the  vast  domains  which  he  ruled,  amid  the 
troubles  of  the  Calling  House,  almost  as  an  independent 
prince.  Otto's  son  was  Henry,  that  brave  duke  whom 
Conrad,  the  first  of  the  non-Carling  emperors,  though  in  his 
days  of  vigour  they  had  been  rivals,  himself,  on  his  death-bed, 
designated  as  the  most  worthy  to  wear  after  him  the  imperial 


1  They  were  related  somehow  to  Widukind  himself. 

8  The  foundation  of  Gandersheim  by  Liudolf  and  Oda  is  related  in  verse 
by  Hruosvitha  (Periz,  iv.  306),  and  in  prose  by  Agius,  Vita  Hathnmod. 
(Ibid.  166-189/',  cf.  Ann.  Qued.  852.     Oda  died  at  the  age  of  107. 


346  DEC  A  V  AND  RED1NTEGRA  TION. 

diadem  ;  to  the  exclusion  of  Conrad's  own  kin.  In  918  Henry 
ascended  the  imperial  throne  as  Henry  I.,  and  is  known  to  us 
as  Henry  the  Fowler.  He  it  was  who  drove  the  Magyar 
hordes  back  from  the  German  lands.  In  him  began  the 
'  Saxon '  emperors  in  Germany.  To  Henry's  grandson  Otto, 
called  Otto  the  Great,  it  was  given,  one  may  say,  to  roll  back 
the  stream  of  time,  and  to  wrest  from  the  popes  the  power 
and  privileges  which,  through  years  of  toil,  they  had  gathered 
at  the  expense  of  the  emperors.  But  these  things  carry  us 
far  beyond  our  present  era. 

In  this  century  there  was  another  great  German  duke  whose 
name  deserves  to  be  had  in  remembrance.  This  was  Duke 
Henry  of  Thuringia,  of  family  and  attainments  not  inferior  to 
the  two  great  Saxon  counts.  Of  some  of  his  own  achieve- 
ments we  shall  hereafter  be  the  witnesses ;  but  as  his 
descendants  were,  so  far  as  we  can  tell,  undistinguished,  there 
is  no  need  to  speak  of  them. 

Let  us  rather  look  across  to  the  western  kingdom,  to  the 
offspring  of  another  Saxon  who  had  settled  there.  This 
Saxon  was  named  Witichin  or  Witikin.  There  is  nothing  to 
show  that  he  was  of  noble  birth  ;  but  in  the  open  field  of  the 
west  he  won  himself  some  fame.  Herein,  however,  he  was  far 
outshone  by  his  son,  that  thrice-famous  Robert  of  whom  we 
have  already  often  had  to  speak.  Robert  became  Count  of 
Anjou.  His  was  the  task  of  defending  the  Breton  marches, 
and  at  the  same  time  of  keeping  guard  against  the  power  of 
the  Vikings  of  the  Loire,  who  were  so  close  to  the  Breton 
frontier;  and  for  a  reward  for  his  great  services  he  held  as 
lay  abbot  the  rich  abbey  of  Marmoutiers  at  Tours.  Robert, 
too,  like  so  many  of  the  founders  of  great  houses  of  this  age, 
we  remember  far  more  for  the  sake  of  his  descendants  than 
for  himself:  so  germinal    was  this  time,  so  full  of  the  seeds 


ROBERT  THE  STRONG.    ALFRED.  347 

of  future  history.  No  need  to  speak  of  the  offspring  of  this 
Robert,  whom  after-ages  would  have  to  have  been  a  beccaio  di 
Parigi.  Even  in  the  course  of  our  history  we  shall  see  the 
enthronement  of  the  first  king  of  this  house,  but  not  the 
definite  and  final  enthronement  of  the  house  in  the  person  of 
Hugh  Capet,  Hugh  of  the  Hood. 

Strange  that  the  two  most  famous  royal  houses  whose  rise 
we  trace  in  this  age  should  both  have  been  Saxon.  Over 
here  in  England  at  the  same  time,  just  growing  up  to  man- 
hood, was  another  Saxon,  a  West  Saxon ;  not  the  founder  of 
a  new  house,  for  he  was  an  aetheling  of  the  reigning  one,  but 
the  father  of  not  less  famous  descendants  than  either  Robert 
or  Liudolf,  and  more  than  they,  the  champion  of  the  civilized 
world  against  the  powers  of  heathendom  and  anarchy  which 
fought  under  the  banners  of  the  Vikings — I  mean  our  English 
Alfred. 

Many  more  of  the  great  men  of  this  age  might  we  speak 
of — of  Count  Baldwin  of  Flanders ;  of  Count  Ramnulf,  Duke 
of  Aquitaine,  who  often,  through  these  dark  days,  fought 
against  the  Vikings  by  the  side  of  Robert  the  Strong ;  of 
Count  Vivianus,  whose  death  we  witnessed  a  while  ago  at  the 
battle  of  Rennes ;  of  Hukbert,  the  grim  abbot,  who  guarded 
the  passes  of  the  Alps  in  his  abbey  of  St.  Maurice  in  Vallais 
(where,  men  said,  there  went  on  doings  strange  indeed  for  the 
home  of  an  ecclesiastic),  and  who,  almost  all  his  life  long, 
was  a  thorn  in  the  side  of  King  Lothair;  of  Ernest  the 
Margrave  of  the  Bohemian  border,  father-in-law  of  Carlman, 
King  Lewis's  eldest  son,  and  for  a  while  Lewis  the  German's 
most  trusted  counsellor,  then  as  suddenly  dismissed  by  him 
and  deprived  of  all  his  fiefs ;  or  of  Adalhard,  the  uncle-in-law 
of  Charles  the  Bald,  his  strongest  defence  in  earlier  days,  but 
like   the   Welfic   brothers,  one  who  in    858   played   the  part 


348  DEC  A  Y  AND  REDINTEGRA  TION. 

of  a  king-maker  between  the  rivals,  Lewis  the  German  and 
Charles ;  *  of  how  many  others. 

Even  then  we  should  only  have  exhausted  the  list  of  the 
great  laymen.  There  still  remain  the  Churchmen,  who  now 
play  such  an  important  part  in  politics,  both  lay  and 
ecclesiastical.  There  are  many  whose  names  might  well 
deserve  to  be  commemorated ;  yet  they  all  sink  into  insignifi- 
cance by  the  side  of  the  greatest  prelate  of  the  Frankish 
Empire  in  the  latter  half  of  the  ninth  century ;  I  mean 
Hincmar,  the  Archbishop  of  Rheims,  who  might  be  called 
the  Hildebrand  of  his  age,  only  that  this  title  belongs  of  right 
to  his  contemporary,  Pope  Nicholas  the  First.  Hincmar  was 
a  Hildebrand  in  character,  but  his  policy  was  the  policy  of 
the  head  of  the  Church  of  France,  of  what  was  to  call  itself 
at  a  later  date  the  Gallican  Church.  It  was  therefore  opposed 
on  many  points  to  the  traditional  policy  of  the  popes,  which 
in  this  age  was  upheld  by  Nicholas  the  First  with  almost  as 
much  courage  and  success  as  in  a  later  century  by  Gregory  VII. 
The  contest  between  Nicholas  and  Hincmar,  when  their  paths 
crossed,  was  a  battle  of  giants ;  but  the  victory  remained  with 
the  pope. 

About  the  time  at  which  we  have  now  arrived — from  about 
the  date  860  onwards — the  policy  of  Charles  the  Bald  was 
directed  by  Hincmar  far  more  than  by  any  other  man  in  the 
kingdom.  No  doubt  we  may  ascribe  to  Hincmar's  counsels 
the  strain  in  Charles  of  greater  steadiness  of  purpose  than 
was  to  be  found  before,  which,  though  matters  might  have 
seemed  almost  beyond  hope,  did  eventually  have  a  very  decided 
effect  upon  the  action  of  the  Vikings,  and  produced  in  the  end  an 
unhoped-for  amelioration  in  the  affairs  of  West  Francia.     But 

x  Adalhard  and  the  Welfings  were  generally  in  rivalry,  and  the  part 
which  the  former  took  in  bringing  in  Lewis  may  have  influenced  the  latter 
o  change  sides.     Cf.  Dummler,  o.c.  i.  422-3. 


SERVICES  OF  THE  CLERICAL  PARTY.  349 

in  his  latter  days,  when  Charles  found  himself  growing  pros- 
perous, he  forsook  the  counsels  of  his  old  adviser,  and  took 
up  with  new  feather-headed  schemes  disastrous  in  their  results, 
of  whose  course  we  shall  see  something  hereafter. 

High-reaching  were  the  claims  now  put  forward  by  the 
clerical  party  in  the  State ;  but  great  at  the  same  time  were 
the  services  they  rendered  to  it,  to  the  strength  of  Christendom 
and  its  defence  against  enemies  within  and  without.  When 
the  Church  party  in  West  Francia  espoused  the  side  of  Charles 
against  Lewis  the  German,  they  at  the  same  time  laid  down 
the  doctrine  that  a  king  neglecting  his  duties  and  country  coula 
be  deposed  ;  the  consecration  of  the  holy  oil  could  be  annulled 
— but  only  by  those  who  had  power  in  such  spiritual  things, 
only  by  the  clergy  in  solemn  synod.     Such  were  their  claims. 

Their  acts  were  for  the  advantage  of  their  country.  Nothing 
would  have  been  gained  by  the  deposition  of  Charles,  and  the 
bestowal  upon  Lewis  of  a  duplex  rule,  a  land  cut  in  two  by 
the  kingdom  of  Lothair. 

Yet  none,  it  seemed,  save  his  ecclesiastics  could  be  relied 
upon  by  the  king.  The  nobility  deserted  his  interests  to 
secure  their  own  power.  Some  of  those  who  were  in  after- 
years  the  bulwarks  of  the  kingdom  were,  during  those  which 
immediately  followed  Lewis's  invasion  and  the  raising  of  the 
siege  of  Oissel,  the  patrons  of  disorder.  Such,  for  example, 
was  Robert  the  Strong,  who,  with  a  party  of  malcontent  nobles 
in  confederation,  drove  Charles's  son  Lewis  from  the  Breton 
marches  and  inaugurated  a  reign  of  lawlessness  there.  Robert 
and  his  allies  were  called  to  account  by  a  synod  held  at 
Saumiers  in  June,  859,  and  threatened  with  excommunication. 

And  now,  also  through  the  pressure  exercised  by 
the  clergy  of  Charles's  and  Lothair's  kingdom,  as 
well   as   through    the   intervention    of   Lothair   II.  himself,  a 
reconciliation  took  place  between  Lewis  the  German  and  his 


350  DEC  A  Y  AND  REDINTEGRA  TION. 

injured  brother,  Charles  the  Bald.  Charles  came  to  a 
conference  at  Coblenz  and  made  a  solemn  recitation  of  his 
wrongs.  Lewis  made  apology,  and  promised  in  the  future  to 
preserve  the  terms  of  the  Treaty  of  Verdun.  This  was  in 
860. 

V. 

Meantime  the  Vikings  had  been  making  unhindered  their 
camps  along  the  chief  rivers  of  France,  and  Charles,  renounc- 
ing his  earlier  ambition  of  driving  them  away  by  force  of  arms, 
began  to  have  recourse  to  his  new  methods.  He  entered  into 
negotiations  with  the  Danes  in  the  Somme.  At  the  head  of 
them  was  a  leader,  Weland  by  name,  a  name  of  terror  or  of 
hope.  Charles  sought  to  enlist  Weland  against  Weland's 
brother,  or  his  rival,  Vikings  of  the  Seine.  The  first  step  in 
the  new  policy  was  a  miserable  failure.  Charles  had  promised 
three  thousand  pounds  of  silver,  and  had  given  hostages  to  the 
Danes  for  the  same.  But  though  the  shrines  and  churches 
were  made  to  yield  up  their  treasures,  the  whole  sum  was  not 
forthcoming,  or  not  so  quickly  as  to  suit  the  requirements  of 
Weland  and  his  men ;  whereat  they  set  sail,  carried  off  their 
hostages,  and  instead  of  falling  upon  the  Vikings  of  the  Seine, 
they  made  for  the  English  coast,  and  plundered  the  famous 
capital  of  Wessex — Winchester.1  This  was  the  first  attack 
which  our  country  had  felt  since  the  death  of  iEthelwulf,  two 
years  before ;  it  is  likewise  the  last  (or  almost  the  last)  in  what 
may  be  called  the  transition  period  of  the  Viking  raids  in  Eng- 
land. A  new  and  disastrous  era  was  to  dawn  for  England,  in 
which  all  the  heroism  of  her  sons  and  all  the  great  qualities 
of  the  children  of  ^Ethelwulf  were  to  be  put  to  the  proof. 

The  English  Chronicle  says  that  subsequent  to 
the  storming  of  Winchester  the  Vikings  were  de- 
feated.     At  any  rate  Weland  and  his   band   came   back  to 

T  AS.  Chron.  860. 
r 


SEINE  AND  SOMME   VIKINGS.  351 

France  next  year.  They  demanded  a  contribution  twice  as 
large  as  the  first — five  thousand  pounds  of  silver,  cattle  and  corn 
for  the  support  of  their  troops  :  and  Charles  the  Bald,  with 
unheard-of  exertions  (extortions,  say  his  detractors),  had  to 
raise  that  vast  sum.  Meantime  the  Seine  Danes  had  grown 
more  insolent  than  before.  Twice  during  the  spring  of  861 
they  seized  horses,  rode  along  the  banks  of  Seine  up  to  Paris, 
which  now  underwent  its  third  and  fourth  plunderings.  The 
churches  of  St.  Vincent  and  St.  Germains  were  a  prey  to  the 
flames — St.  Germains,  which  had  once  been  a  scene  of  such 
disaster  to  the  ravagers,  was  now  plundered  unavenged. 

But  joy  no  doubt  awoke  in  many  breasts  at  the  news  that, 
the  treaty  with  Weland  being  completed,  the  Somme  Danes 
had  in  very  truth  set  sail  for  the  Seine.  The  Seine  Danes 
were  shut  in  by  their  fellow- Vikings,  hard  pressed  by  hunger. 
But  there  was  no  thought  on  the  part  of  Weland  and  his  fleet 
of  destroying  their  fellow-countrymen.  They  need  only  agree 
to  disgorge  their  plunder.  Hard  pressed  and  much  against  their 
will,  the  Seine  Vikings  at  last  promised  to  pay  to  the  Vikings 
of  the  Somme  six  thousand  pounds  in  gold  and  silver.  At 
that  price  they  gained  a  free  passage  to  the  sea,  to  turn  to  other 
lands  or  to  return  to  these,  when  the  rival  fleet  should  have 
sailed  away.  If  the  Christians  objected  to  this  treaty  let  them 
do  better  for  themselves.  Many  of  the  Oissel  Danes  joined 
hands  with  their  conquerors.  They  were  under  no  famous 
leader  :  so  they  took  service  with  Weland's  son.  Charles  had 
gained  little  by  all  his  exertions  and  negotiations,  by  the 
plunderings  (as  men  called  them)  of  Christian  churches.  He 
had  to  place  troops  under  his  son  Lewis  to  guard  the  Seine 
and  keep  watch  over  the  vast  body  of  Vikings  spread  along  all 
its  length.  But  as  for  direct  attacks  they  were  not  to  be 
thought  of. 

The  plunderings  in  Friesland  were  as  bad.  The  Vikings  had 


352  DEC  A  V  AND  REDINTEGRA  TION. 

firm    hold   of    the    Batavian    island.      They  had     plundered 
a  ™  Utrecht,  and  destroyed  many  of  its  churches,  and 

A.D.  862—4.     . 

in  the  year  862  they  made  another  descent  on 
Saxony.  Lewis  the  German  came  north  to  defend  his  terri- 
tories. This  visit  of  his  to  Saxony  in  the  year  862  was  the 
last  he  ever  made  to  that  country.  Henceforth  to  Liudolf  and 
its  other  native  counts  must  Saxony  trust.  The  following  year 
the  Vikings  were  up  the  Rhine  again,  first  to  Dorstad.  They 
sailed  farther,  to  the  abbey  of  Xanten,  and  burnt  its  beautiful 
church,  St.  Victor.  But,  say  the  Xanten  chroniclers,  they  were 
seized  with  madness  when  they  had  done  this,  and  abandoned 
the  treasure  they  had  robbed  from  the  churches.1  Lothair  II. 
bestirred  himself  this  year.  He  joined  hands  with  the  Saxons, 
eager  to  revenge  the  ravages  of  862.  We  see  the  Saxons  now 
acting  independently,  making  independent  alliances.  The  two 
Christian  armies  marched  along  opposite  banks  down  the 
Rhine.  Lothair  effected  nothing  with  his  troops.  But  the 
Saxons  did  come  to  blows  with  their  enemies,  defeated  them 
and  slew  their  leader  Kalbi.2 

These  victories  were  ineffective.  The  Vikings  continued  to 
settle  in  the  Low  Countries.  Rudolf,  a  son  of  the  baptized 
Harald — a  nephew  therefore  to  Rorik  and  brother  to  Godfred 
— received  a  heavy  tribute  from  Lothair,  presumably  as  guardian 
of  the  Frisian  coasts  (a.d.  864).  The  Vikings  who  came  to 
England  about  this  time  are  called  by  a  chronicler  Sea/dings, 
i.e.,  Scheld  men.3  From  which  it  would  seem  that  the  North- 
men held  a  firm  station  on  that  river  as  well  as  upon  all  the 
mouths  of  the  Rhine. 


1  This  sounds  like  a  reminiscence  of  the  Paris  miracle.  Ann.  X.  a.  864 
(P.  ii.  231-2).     A.  X.  are  generally  one  year  later  than  the  true  date. 

3  Ibid. 

3  'Scaldingi,'  Sim.  Dun.  in  M.  H.  B.,  p.  795-800.  Cf.  Storm, Bidrag, 
etc.,   p.  81. 


CHILDREN  OF  CHARLES  THE  BALD.  353 

Charles  had  begun  the  process  of  blocking  the  Seine  at 
Pitres.  It  was  to  produce  good  results  in  later  years.  But  at 
present  all  seemed  to  point  to  disaster.  Charles's  children 
were  following  the  Carling  tradition  and  turning  against  him — 
two  were  especially  troublesome,  his  daughter  Judith  and  his 
son  Lewis.  Judith  had  been  years  ago,  as  we  saw,  married  to 
^Ethelwulf  of  England.  But  he  died  in  858,  two  years  before 
Weland's  attack  on  Winchester,  and  Judith,  who  had  scandalized 
England  and  Europe  by  a  marriage  with  her  husband's  son 
^Ethelbald,  was  now  left  a  second  time  a  widow.  She  came 
back  to  France,  to  her  father's  Court.  There  she  cast  her 
wandering  glances  upon  one  of  the  new  men  who  had  grown 
to  favour  and  fame  in  the  defence  of  the  land  against  the 
Danes,  that  Baldwin  the  Forester  of  whom  mention  has  been 
made.  She  allowed  Baldwin  to  carry  her  off — yield- 
ing  professedly  to  force — and  consented  to  become 
his  wife.  But  Charles  the  Bald  was  so  greatly  incensed  that 
he  forbade  the  marriage,  though  the  only  effect  must  be  to  dis- 
grace his  daughter.  Lewis  sided  with  his  sister,  and  Baldwin 
appealed  to  the  Pope.  It  was  Pope  Nicholas  I.,  always  on  the 
lookout  for  an  occasion  to  intervene  in  the  affairs  of  the 
empire.  Though  he  had  at  this  moment  Lothair's  marriage 
question  upon  his  hands,  Nicholas  did  not  fear  to  brave  the 
anger  of  the  West  Frank  king  by  espousing  the  cause  of 
Baldwin  and  of  Judith. 

It  gives  us  a  picture  of  the  lawlessness  of  the  time  that 
Baldwin  should  have  dared  to  threaten  to  join  forces  with  the 
Danes,  and  that  the  pope  should  have  pleaded  this  danger  as  a 
reason  for  Charles's  reconciling  himself  with  his  rebellious 
subject.  Low  indeed  had  sunk  the  Carlings  when  they  were 
obliged  to  make  terms  with  subjects  on  such  terms  as  these. 
Yet  here  were  Charles's  children  combining  against  him,  siding 
with  this  contumacious  lord.     Long  as  Charles  kicked  against 

24 


3  54  DEC  A  Y  AND  RED1NTEGRA  TION. 

the  pricks,  he  had  to  give  way  in  the  end  and  allow  Judith's 

a  -n  OM      marriage   to  be  publicly  solemnized.     There  was, 
indeed,  no  room  for  any  other  policy  than  that  of 
keeping  the  Vikings  at  bay. 

The  Vikings  of  the  Loire  country  were  stirring  again — in 
Poictou — some  had  even  penetrated  as  far  as  Auvergne. 
Pippin,  the  old  pretender  to  Aquitaine,  sprang  out  of  obscurity 
once  more  and  openly  joined  forces  with  this  band  of  pirates. 

One  consoling  feature  in  the  situation  was  that  one  of  the 
great  leaders  of  the  Seine  Danes — Bjorn  Ironside,  the  son  of 

a  ™  okq  Ragnar  Lodbrok — had  come  to  Charles  a  year  or 
two  ago  to  Verberie  and  done  homage.  This  was 
another  part  of  the  policy  of  Charles — to  try  and  settle  the 
more  peacefully  disposed  among  the  Viking  leaders  in  the 
territories  near  his  coast  where  they  might  serve  as  a  barrier 
against  fresh  fleets. 

A  still  more  consolatory  feature  was  the  growing  activity  of 
some  of  the  great  vassals — those  new  men  of  whom  we  have 
spoken.  Count  Baldwin  both  before  and  after  he  got  into 
trouble  with  King  Charles  deserved  well  of  the  State  for  his 
defence  of  the  Flanders  country.  Through  him  the  Vikings 
were  driven  off  in  863.  Still  more  renowned  were  the  achieve- 
ments of  Robert  and  of  Ramnulf  in  these  years.  Robert  the 
Strong  gained,  moreover,  in  863,  a  great  victory  over  the 
Bretons  and  over  Lewis,  Charles  the  Bald's  own  son,  who  was 
in  rebellion  against  his  father.  This  victory  was  followed  in 
864  by  a  peace  in  which  the  Breton  king  (Salomon1  his  name 
was)  once  more  became  a  tributary  of  the  King  of  the  Franks, 
and  part  of  what  Charles  had  been  fighting  for  ever  since  he 
came  to  the  throne  was  regained.  Against  the  Loire  Vikings 
the  efforts  of  Robert  and  Ramnulf  were  unceasing  in  these 

1  Salomon   was  a  usurper   who   had   murdered  the  preceding    prince, 
Erispoi — possibly  with  the  connivance  of  Charles.     See  Gfrorer  o.c. 


DEATH  OF  ROBERT  AND  RAMNULF.  355 

years  (865,  866).     Not  always  victorious  but  never  dispirited, 

they  carried  on  their  work  and  wore  out  their  foes  by  continued 

conflicts. 

But  what  evil  fate  was  that  which  in  the  autumn     .  _  Mi> 

A.D.  866. 

of  the  latter  year  sent  these  two  heroes  together  in 
pursuit  of  a  little  band  of  some  four  hundred  Danes  and 
Bretons  who  had  galloped  across  country  to  fall  upon  the 
town  of  Le  Mans,  on  the  Sarthe,  not  far  removed  either  from 
the  Breton  borders  or  the  settlements  of  the  Loire  Danes  ? 
This  was  the  country  which  had  been  specially  trusted  to  the 
care  of  Count  Robert.  He  collected  a  troop,  and  on  their 
way  back  the  plunderers  were  met  by  this  corps  of  Franks, 
under  the  command  of  Count  Robert,  Count  Ramnulf,  Count 
Heriveus,  and  Count  Godfred,  all  redoubted  champions  of 
Christendom,  though  the  last,  one  would  think,  must  have  been 
a  Dane  by  descent.  The  marauders  on  their  side  were  under 
the  orders  of  a  very  famous  Viking  leader — the  second  most 
famous  in  tradition  of  all  those  who  were  active  in  this  century 
— the  leader  Hasting.  Under  such  a  captain  the  Vikings  were 
not  likely  to  submit  tamely  nor  at  once;  for,  besides  his 
strength  in  battle,  Hasting  was  famous  above  all  other  Viking 
captains  for  his  resource  in  moments  of  difficulty. 

It  was  at  Brisarthe  that  the  Franks  came  up  with  the  Danes  : 
they  so  far  outnumbered  them  that  the  latter  had  no  choice 
but  to  shut  themselves  up  in  a  strong  stone  church  which  the 
place  boasted.1  All  who  could  not  find  refuge  there  in  time 
were  slain.  Those  inside  could  not,  however,  be  driven  out — 
unlucky  that  here  there  should  be  a  church  of  stone;  had  it 
been  of  wood  only  !  But  by  this  time  in  France  proper  wooden 
churches  were  beginning  to  be  outnumbered  by  the  stone  ones. 
The  afternoon  wore  on  to  evening — in  fruitless  attacks.     At 

x  Regino,  s.a.  867  [=  866]. 


356  DEC  A  Y  AND  RED1NTEGRA  TlON. 

last  the  Franks  resolved  to  fix  their  camp  outside  the  church, 
and  renew  the  attack  next  day.  Count  Robert  was  resting 
from  his  labours  and  had  laid  aside  his  helmet  and  his  breast- 
plate for  a  moment  to  cool  himself  in  the  breeze  of  that  autumn 
evening.     All  work  seemed  ended  for  that  day. 

But  not  so  thought  the  hawk-eyed  Hasting  or  his  Danes,  for 
ever  on  the  alert.  Few  as  they  were  they  chose  this  moment 
to  make  a  sally  on  the  unsuspecting  Franks.  Immediately  all 
was  in  confusion.  Count  Robert  seized  his  arms  and  rushed 
bareheaded  to  the  front.  Count  Ramnulf  had  come  up.  The 
Franks  held  their  own,  and  now  began  to  drive  back  the  foe 
with  the  weight  of  their  superior  numbers,  Count  Robert  still 
fighting  at  their  front.  But  alas  !  in  the  doors  of  the  church 
the  Vikings  made  a  stand  (or  maybe  they  had  only  pretended 
to  fly  thither  in  order  to  draw  on  their  foe),  and  in  the  melee 
there  Robert  was  struck  down.  An  arrow  from  the  window 
gave  Ramnulf  a  wound  from  which  in  a  few  days  he  died. 
And  the  Christians  were  so  disconcerted  at  the  fall  of  the 
bravest  of  their  leaders  that  they  thought  no  more  of  destroying 
Hasting  and  his  followers,  but  stood  idly  by  and  let  them 
escape  to  their  ships.1  In  truth,  as  a  contemporary  says,  the 
loss  was  worse  than  the  loss  of  ten  thousand  men.  What 
could  make  up  to  France  for  the  death  of  this  chosen 
champion,  this  Judas  Maceabaeus,2  who  seemed  called  by 
Heaven  to  free  the  people  of  the  Lord  from  their  oppressors. 

Robert  left  two  sons  behind  him,  another  Robert,  afterwards 
Count  of  Paris,  and  Odo,  who  rose  higher  still,  to  be  King 
of  France.  They  were  too  young  to  receive  the  position  and 
the  fiefs  which  he  had  held  ;  these  were  granted,  most  of  them, 
to  Hugh  the  Welf,  a  worthy  follower  in  Robert's  steps.     He 

1  The  best  account  of  this  is  in  Regino,  I.e.  ;  cf.  also  A.  Bert.  866  (P.  i. 
472-3)  ;   A.  X.  867  ;  Ami.  Fuld.  (Anon.)  867. 
a  Ann.  Fuld.  I.e. 


DEATH  OF  ROBERT  AND  RAMNULF.  357 

now  became  Abbot  of  Marmoutiers.  On  him  for  many  years 
rested  the  best  hopes  of  France.  But  Odo  and  Robert  in- 
herited something  better  than  the  possessions  of  their  father — 
his  undaunted  valour  and  the  honour  of  his  name.  Their  day 
of  fame  was  to  come. 

This  sad  disaster  closed  the  year  866.  It  would  have 
seemed  to  an  outside  observer  that  no  amelioration  had  begun 
in  the  affairs  of  France,  no  cessation  in  the  Viking  terror. 
But  a  nearer  view  would  have  shown  a  growing  weariness  on 
the  part  of  the  invaders.  They  seemed  somehow  to  make  no 
progress,  and  many  were  becoming  tired  of  remaining  mere 
settlers  on  the  outskirts  of  the  empire.  Yet,  what  other  future 
lay  before  them,  while  they  continued  on  the  Seine  or  on 
the  Loire  ?  No  doubt  the  majesty,  the  prestige,  which  still 
hemmed  round  the  imperial  name  had  some  effect  upon  their 
imagination.  They  might  settle  like  leeches  upon  the  body 
of  the  Frankish  state,  but  the  thought  of  making  a  conquest 
of  the  Franks  at  all  comparable  (if  they  knew  of  them)  to  the 
Norwegian  conquests  in  Ireland  was  still  far  from  their  minds. 
If,  then,  they  would  inaugurate  a  new  era,  change  from  their 
transition  state  of  mere  settlers,  mere  sucking  leeches,  and 
appear  as  conquerors  and  the  colonizers  of  conquered  lands, 
they  must  look  elsewhere  than  to  France.  And  many  had 
already  begun  to  cast  their  eyes  across  the  English  channel  and 
to  speculate  on  the  possibility  of  wholly  subduing  this  country, 
and  erecting  in  it  a  new  Scandinavian  state — a  Viking  state,  fit 
to  balance  the  growing  power  and  the  growing  concentration  of 
the  parent  kingdoms  in  Denmark  and  Norway  and  Sweden. 


CHAPTER  XII. 

THE   GREAT  ARMY. 

I. 

Already  some  of  the  great  leaders  were  growing  impatient  of 
their  life  in  France.  Bjorn  Ironside — we  saw  him  some  years  ago, 
coming  to  the  Court  of  Charles  the  Bald  at  Verberie  and  doing 
homage  to  the  king  for  a  fief  which  he  received,  as  though  he 
had  made  up  his  mind  to  give  up  the  life  of  adventure  and 
settle  down  in  France.  But  the  Viking  spirit  came  upon  him 
again  before  long,  and  next  year  he  set  to  work  to  fit  out  a  new 
expedition  and  to  prepare  for  a  voyage  more  adventurous  than 
any  which  a  Scandinavian  fleet  had  yet  embarked  upon.  This  was 
in  8^q,  seven  years  before  the  last  event  related  in 

A.D.  859.  oy 

the  preceding  chapter.  By  the  side  of  Bjorn  in 
this  voyage  we  find  the  same  leader  whom  we  have  just  seen 
resisting  the  attack  of  Count  Robert  at  Brisarthe,  and  causing 
the  death  of  the  count — I  mean  Hasting.  So  that,  when  he 
made  that  marauding  attack  upon  Le  Mans,  Hasting  had  pro- 
bably not  long  returned  from  the  far  more  exciting  and  perilous 
adventure  which  we  have  now  to  relate.  Unfortunate  that,  as 
is  their  wont,  the  chroniclers  give  us  the  outlines  only  of  this 
voyage  of  discovery. 

Hasting  has  not  a  good  character  in  the  Norman  tradition. 


HASTING  AND  BJORN.  359 

He  appears  in  Dudo  as  a  kind  of  rival  of  Rolf  the  Ganger,  the 
conqueror  of  Normandy.  He  appears  as  the  Odysseus  among 
the  band  of  Viking  chiefs,  the  man  of  many  wiles  ;  and  among 
a  people  who,  whatever  their  practice,  did  not  perhaps  hold 
wiliness  in  such  good  repute  as  it  st^od  among  the  Greeks. 
Hasting  was  one  of  those  who  in  after-years  became  amenable 
to  the  new  policy  instituted  by  Charles  the  Bald;  that  is  to  say, 
he  was  one  of  those  whom  it  was  possible  to  bribe  over  to  the 
Christian  side,  to  set  to  guard  the  frontier  against  fresh  bands 
of  Vikings.  In  those  later  years  he  received  the  rich  territory 
of  Chartres  and  was  often  treated  by  the  King  of  France  as  one 
of  his  trusted  counsellors.  In  such  a  capacity  he  appeared 
before  the  fleet  of  Rolf  when  it  neared  the  Norman  coast.  He 
came  to  parley  with  the  crews  in  the  name  of  the  French  king. 
They  demanded  who  he  was.  '  Heard  ye  never  of  Hasting?' 
was  the  reply  of  the  famous  Viking.  '  Yea,'  answered  Rolf, 
1  we  have  heard  of  him  as  the  man  who  began  well  and  ended 
ill.'  Such  is  the  Hasting  of  Norman  tradition.  At  the  same 
time  this  friend  of  the  Christians  is  represented  as  the  most 
cruel  of  the  heathen  leaders,  compared  to  whom  Rolf  and  his 
men  come  as  a  sort  of  saviours  to  the  land  they  conquered.1 

Bjorn,  then,  and  this  Hasting  in  a.d.  859  prepared  their 
fleet.2  There  was,  it  seems,  likewise  a  younger  brother  of 
Bjorn  on  board,  another  son  of  Ragnar  Lodbrok.  The  fleet 
was  not  a  large  one,  compared  to  many  which  we  have  seen — 
not  more  than  seventy  sail.  But  then  this  was  a  voyage  of  abso- 
lutely new  adventure,  promising  no  immediate  gain,  for  it  was  not 
directed  against  the  known  lands  of  France  or  Frisia,  nor  even 
against  the  English  coast,  but  designed  for  the  far  southern 
shores  of  Spain,  and,  as  it  proved,  for  countries  farther  still. 

1  Dudo  (Bk.  i.)  devotes  eleven  lines  of  bombastic  verse  and  as  many  of 
prose  to  abuse  of  Hasting. 

2  Fabricius,  Forbindcheme  tnellem  Noiden  og  den  sp.  Halv'6,  p.  69  sqq. 


36o  THE  GREA  T  ARM  Y. 

Spain  had  up  to  now  been  only  once  visited  by  a  Viking  fleet, 
fifteen  years  ago.  This  fleet  of  Bjorn  made  first  for  the  same 
regions  which  had  been  before  attacked — the  kingdom  of 
Asturias  which  lay  among  its  mountains  upon  the  northern 
coast,  that  single  state  in  which  the  Northern  pirates  never 
made  any  way.  Ramiro  I.  had  been  the  King  of  Asturias  at 
the  time  of  the  first  attack.  The  name  of  the  present  king  was 
Ordono  I.  Of  the  kings  of  these  days  we  know  no  more,  or 
little  more,  than  the  names,  much  as  we  should  like  to  know. 
Ordono  was  at  the  moment  engaged  against  his  constant 
enemies  the  Moors  :  but  a  count  of  the  province,  Don  Pedro, 
attacked  the  Vikings  and  defeated  them,  driving  them  out  of 
this  country.  They  put  to  sea  again  and  now  once  again  the 
Northerners  reached  the  kingdom  of  the  Arabs.  They  found 
the  same  fleets  guarding  the  coasts  that  had  proved  so  formid- 
able to  their  predecessors  ;  and  in  attacks  on  these  and 
unsuccessful  attempts  to  land,  they  sailed  down  the  western 
coast  of  Spain.  The  Viking  fleet  consisted  of  but  two-and- 
sixty  sail  when  it  was  first  descried  by  the  fleet  of  the  Arabs  ; 
and  in  encounters  with  these  last  the  Northmen  lost  two  of 
their  ships.  But  still  they  sailed  on  ;  and  now  they  came  to 
the  southern  coasts,  and  sighted  the  minarets  of  Seville  and  the 
orange  groves  of  the  Guadalquivir.  That  land  must  have 
seemed  an  earthly  paradise  to  these  sons  of  Boreas,  and  might 
well  invite  them  to  strenuous  attempts  at  conquest.  But  the 
Arabs  were  prepared  to  receive  them.  An  army  under  the 
banner  of  Hajib  Isa-ibn-Hassan  marched  upon  the  marauders, 
and  the  fleet  was  obliged  to  weigh  anchor  and  sail  out  to  the 
open  sea. 

And  now  it  did  what  no  northern  fleet  had  ever  done  before 
— sailed  through  the  Pillars  of  Hercules,  and  its  crews  were  the 
first  of  their  race  who  ever  burst  into  the  Mediterranean  Sea. 
Tacitus  tells  us  in  his  '  Germania  '  that  the  Germans  in  his  day 


VIKINGS  IN  THE  MEDITERRANEAN.  361 

showed  the  place  where  their  Hercules  had  set  up  his  pillars 
in  the  far  north.  This  may  have  been  the  entrance  to  that  very 
Vik  whence  most  of  the  Viking  ships  had  issued.  Hercules 
would  be  the  Scandinavian  god  Thorr.  Now  the  Northeners 
were  to  make  acquaintance  with  the  places  which  classical 
tradition  connected  with  the  travels  of  Trior's  counterpart  the 
classic  Hercules,  and  with  the  famed  garden  of  the  daughters 
of  the  West. 

Once  through  the  Pillars  of  Hercules  the  northern  fleet 
passed,  as  the  Arab  chronicler  says,  like  a  desolating  whirlwind, 
along  the  provinces  of  Raya,  Cartana,  Rondas,  Malaga,  all  parts 
of  the  present  province  of  Malaga ;  it  sailed  on  to  Algezera 
and  there  burnt  a  very  celebrated  mosque.  But  everywhere 
the  Arab  troops  were  on  the  alert.  The  Vikings  gained  one 
victory  over  them.  But  on  the  approach  of  a  larger  force, 
despatched  by  the  Emir  himself,  they  left  the  Spanish  coast 
and  sailed  across  the  sea  to  Morocco,  to  a  place  called  Nekor.1 
The  Moorish  king  gathered  an  army  to  encounter  the  strangers, 
but  his  courage  failed  him  at  the  pinch.  He  fled  by  night;  and 
vvhen  his  army  awoke  and  found  it  was  leaderless,  it  also  took 
to  flight.  From  Nekor  the  fleet  came  back  to  the  Murcian 
coast  and  gained  a  victory  over  the  coast  militia.  From  Murcia 
they  passed  on  to  Alicante  (to  Orihuela).  But  at  sea  they 
were  caught  by  the  Arab  squadron  and  lost  two  more  of  their 
vessels  ;  fifty-eight  sail  now  at  most  instead  of  seventy. 
They  visited  the  Balearic  Isles  and  made  great  havoc  there ; 
and  then  they  navigated  right  up  the  eastern  coast  of  Spain — - 
all  regions  which  had  never  before  known,  perhaps  never  before 
heard  of,  their  terrors.  They  marched  inland  and  attacked 
Pampeluna  and  took  prisoner  Garcia,  King  of  Vasconia  or 
Navarre.       He  paid  a  ransom  of  ninety  thousand   denarii, 

1  Still  so  called. 


362  THE  GREAT  ARMY. 

According  to  some  accounts  they  took  Narbonne ;  it  is  certain 
i hat  they  plundered  the  holy  places  in  Rousillon.  Last  of  all 
they  set  sail  far  over  the  Mediterranean  until  they  came  to  the 
delta  of  the  Rhone  and  the  low  island  which  that  delta  forms 
and  which  is  called  the  Camargue. 

The  Camargue  had  already  for  some  time  been  a  favourite 
haunt  of  the  Arab  corsairs,  the  Mediterranean  counterparts  of 
the  Vikings.  It  was  their  Walcheren  or  Oissel,  the  safe  place 
in  which  they  refitted  their  rates  quassas  and  prepared  fresh 
assaults  upon  the  inland  towns.1  These  Arab  pirates  had 
grown  to  a  height  of  insolence  which  might  rival  that  of  the 
Vikings  in  the  north.  Witness  a  story  which  the  Hincmar  tells 
us  of  the  Bishop  of  Aries  and  the  Arab  pirates,  comparable  in 
every  way  to  some  of  the  stories  of  the  Vikings  and  their 
doings.  The  Arabs  took  the  unfortunate  bishop  prisoner  and 
treated  him  so  roughly  that  he  died  in  their  hands.  But  mean- 
while they  found  that  the  people  of  Aries  were  ready  to  give 
any  sum  to  ransom  the  man  of  God.  The  bishop  therefore 
was  brought  forward  from  the  pirate  galleys,  dressed  in  his 
robes,  seated  on  his  throne.  How  reverently  these  Moslem 
bear  the  holy  man  !  And  now  the  people  see  that  their  bishop 
is  really  to  be  brought  back  to  them,  they  pay  the  ransom  at 
once.  The  pirates  place  him  on  the  sea-shore  and  retire  ;  the 
people  rush  forward  to  kiss  his  hand  and  receive  his  benediction. 
Alas  !  that  hand  is  cold.  It  was  a  dead  bishop  which  the 
Saracens  bore  wi'h  such  care,  for  whom  we  have  paid  such  a 
heavy  ransom.  The  Arabs  of  the  Camargue  were  not  likely  to 
yield  a  ready  place  to  strangers.  We  may  presume,  therefore, 
that  at  this  moment  they  had  abandoned  the  Camargue  for 
more  promising  fields  in  Italy;  for  we  do  not  hear  that  these 
two  rival  powers  of  the  sea  came  into  contact  now,  and  it  is 

1  Prudentius  mentions  an  attack  by  them  on  Aries  in  a,d.  842, 


SIEGE  OF  LUNA.  363 

probable  that  Bjdrn  and  Hasting  and  their  fleet  stayed  through 
the  winter  months  of  859-C0  by  the  island.  '  They  fortified 
themselves  in  a  town,'  says  the  chronicler,  '  which  to  this  day 
bears  their  name.'  We  do  not  hear  that  the  Vikings  were  dis- 
turbed in  their  winter  retreat.  They  were  now  in  the  country 
of  the  King  of  Provence,  of  Charles,  the  third  son  of  Lothair, 
a  poor,  weakly,  epileptic  prince,  about  whom  history  is  almost 
silent.  He  was  still  young,  but  his  life  was  worth  just  three 
years'  purchase  and  no  more  :  not  a  king  whom  the  Northmen 
need  dread.  They  made  a  short  expedition  up  the  Rhone  and 
took  Valence.  But  when  spring  came  round  a  new  and 
weightier  enterprise  possessed  their  thoughts ;  nothing  less 
than  an  attack  upon  the  capital  of  the  world — in  a  certain 
sense  it  was  this  still — upon  Rome  itself — that  strange  city 
of  which  no  doubt  many  of  their  legends  told. 

They  did  set  sail,  but  from  want  of  pilots  they  came  not  to 
the  Tiber  but  to  the  Bay  of  Spezzia  where  marble  Luna  lay 
mirrored  in  the  sea.1  Luna  had  already  been  attacked  by  one 
set  of  pirates — the  Arabs — in  848,  and,  being  still  fortified  with 
its  Roman  walls,  it  might  defy  the  siege  of  this  fleet's  crew  of 
Vikings  devoid  of  machinery  for  engineering  works. 

Hasting,  that  Loki  of  the  Vikings,  had  (as  the  story  goes) 
other  weapons  at  hand  beside  those  of  open  force.  He  devised 
a  trick  whereby  his  followers  should  find  their  way  into  the 
gates.  He  sent  to  say  that  he  and  his  comrades  had  not  come 
to  make  war  upon  Christians ;  that  they  had  been  driven  by 
their  fellow-countrymen  from  their  settlements  in  France ;  that 
he  himself  was  near  his  end,  and  all  he  desired  was  to  be 
admitted  by  baptism  into  the  Christian  Church.  It  had  become 
not  uncommon,  as  we  know,  for  the  Northmen  to  seek  this 

1  Or  perhaps  first  to  Pisa,  afterwards  to  Luna.  On  the  grounds  for  sup- 
posing that  the  following  incident  which  is  sporadic  in  Viking  legend  really 
belongs  to  this  Luna  expedition,  see  Steenstrup,  o.c.  i.  26  so. 


364  THE  GREAT  ARMY. 

right  of  way  to  salvation,  and  to  do  so  upon  their  death-beds. 
The  Bishop  of  Luna  came  out  with  due  procession  of  priests 
and  choir  to  visit  the  sick  Hasting  and  to  perform  the  right  he 
prayed  for.  It  was  no  surprise  to  the  Christians  to  learn  on 
the  following  day  that  the  Viking  leader  was  dead,  and  that  he 
had  claimed,  as  he  had  a  right  to  claim,  Christian  burial  in 
Christian  ground.  Accordingly  the  governor  (prcssul)  and  the 
Bishop  of  Luna  prepared  to  admit  a  cortege  of  mourners  round 
the  bier  of  the  dead  sea-king.  In  solemn  procession,  with 
tapers  and  chantings,  it  was  conducted  to  the  monastery  in  the 
middle  of  the  city,  and  the  mass  for  the  dead  was  sung.  Then 
they  made  preparations  for  the  burial.  But  the  Northmen  round 
the  bier  raised  a  shout  of  refusal.  What  was  its  meaning  ? 
The  heathens,  we  know,  burned  their  dead,  did  not  bury  them. 
Burn  or  bury  ?  became  in  after-years  a  test  question  in  the 
North,  showing  whether  some  king  or  warrior  had  really  died  a 
Christian  or  a  heathen.  Was  that  the  meaning  of  this  shout  of 
resistance?  Were  the  heathen  followers  going  after  all  to  insist 
that  their  leader  should  be  interred  as  a  heathen?  The  governor 
and  all  the  chief  men  of  the  town  stood  astonished  and  in 
doubt.  When  suddenly — what  is  this  wonder  ? — the  body 
of  the  dead  chief  sprang  up.  Hasting  was  alive  again.  He 
and  his  mourners  drew  their  swords,  cut  down  all  who  stood  in 
their  way,  and  held  the  town  gate.  A  moment  was  enough  : 
for  the  Norsemen  had  stationed  an  ambush  near  the  gates. 
And  so  in  a  few  minutes  the  town  itself  was  in  the  hands  of  the 
Vikings,  and  the  massacre  of  the  citizens  and  the  spoiling  of 
the  shrines  began.1 

Such  is  the  story  preserved  in  Norman  tradition.     After  this 

Luna  expedition  we  do  not  quite  know  the  next  movements  of 

the  fleet.      One  of  its  leaders,  the  younger  brother   of  Bjorn, 

had  long  been  for  turning  back.     It  may  be  that  his  voice  was 

1  This  account  is  taken  from  Dudo,  i.  5-7. 


DEATH  OF  RAGNAR  LODBROK.  365 

now  listened  to.  While  they  were  still  upon  the  African 
coast  he  had  had  an  evil  dream.  He  dreamt  that  their  father, 
his  and  Bjorn's,  was  in  imminent  peril.  '  He  is  now  alive  in  a 
country  which  is  not  his  own.  The  (second)  son  whom  we  left 
with  him  has  been  killed,  as  was  revealed  to  me  by  a  dream, 
and  his  other  son  was  slain  in  battle.  It  is  wonderful,  too, 
if  our  father  himself  has  escaped  from  that  battle.' J 

In  862  we  find  the  leaders  of  this  expedition  back  again  in 
the  west,  in  Brittany.  In  866  Hasting,  as  we  saw,  was  busily 
harassing  the  Loire  country  and  the  Breton  marches,  and  was 
instrumental  in  the  death  of  Count  Robert  the  Strong. 

II. 

What  was  the  meaning  of  that  dream  of  Ragnar's  son? 
What  was  the  fate  of  Ragnar,  the  father,  which  it  had  fore- 
shadowed ?  The  Norse  tradition  tells  us  how  Ragnar,  envious 
of  the  fame  which  his  sons  had  acquired  by  the  slaying  of 
Eystein,  King  of  Sweden,  determined,  on  his  own  account,  to 
make  an  expedition  westward.  With  two  huge  galleys  he  set 
sail  for  England.  There  reigned  King  ^lla.  Ragnar's  ships 
were  caught  in  a  storm  and  wrecked  upon  the  Northumbrian 
coast ;  his  men  were  killed,  he  himself  seized  and  brought 
before  ^Ella,  and  by  command  of  the  king  was  cast  into  a  pit 
of  serpents.  There,  like  another  Hogni,  he  seized  his  harp, 
and,  as  the  serpents  bit  deep  into  his  flesh,  entoned  the 
triumphant  ballad  of  his  deeds  and  the  prophecy  of  the 
vengeance  which  would  overtake  his  destroyer — 

I  hope  that  Widri's  2  wand  will  ^Ella  pierce, 

My  sons  shall  swell  with  wrath  at  their  father's  betrayal. 

Ready  am  I  to  be  gone.     The  Disir  call  me  home. 
When  Odin  the  leader  sends  from  his  Hall, 


1  O'Donovan,   Three  fragments,  p.  160,  cf.  Fornald.  S'dgur,  i.  283,  and 
Steenstrup,  o.c.  i.  92.  s  Odin's. 


366  THE  GREAT  ARMY. 

Gladly  shall  I  quaff  ale  with  the  /Esir  on  my  seat : 
My  life's  hours  are  done  ;  joyful  I  depart. 

But  another  tradition  makes  ^Ella  a  king  in  Ireland,  who  by 
treachery  gets  possession  of  the  person  of  Ragnar,  and  puts 
him  to  death  in  the  manner  described  above. 

There  was  an  ^lla  who  reigned  in  Northumbria  a  few  years 
after  the  date  of  the  dream  of  Ragnar's  son.  He  may  even 
have  been  a  powerful  nobleman,  a  sort  of  under-king  at  this 
time.1  Later  on,  though  not  of  the  royal  house,  he  raised  a 
party  which  proclaimed  htm  King  of  Northumbria,  where  he 
stood  as  the  rival  of  the  legitimate,  king,  Osberht ;  until  they 
and  their  rivalries  were  alike  extinguished  by  the  swords  of  the 
Danes. 

Another  tradition  from  an  English  source  2  makes  the  death 
of  Ragnar  Lodbrok  the  cause  of  the  invasion  of  East  Anglia 
and  of  the  martyrdom  of  St.  Eadmund,  the  king  of  that  country, 
events  which  followed  hard  upon  the  invasion  of  Northumbria 
and  the  death  of  ^Ella.  Both  traditions  point  to  the  con- 
clusion that  the  great  invasion  of  England  of  which  we  have 
now  to  speak  was  connected  with  the  death,  the  violent  death 
— the  murder,  if  we  like  to  call  it  so — of  the  great  Norse  hero. 
The  story  of  the  dream  of  Ragnar's  son  comes  from  a  source 
distinct  alike  from  the  Norse  tradition  of  the  death  of  Lodbrok, 
and  from  the  English  tradition.  It  seems  in  some  ways  to  chime 
in  curiously  with  them  ;  but  in  other  respects  there  are  great 
difficulties  in  the  way  of  reconciling  the  story  of  the  dream 
with  the  death  of    Ragnar  on    the    one  hand,  or,  if  that  be 

1  Simeon  of  Durham  {H.  D.  E.  c.  vi.)  says  that  the  Danish  invasion  of 
Northumbria,  which  we  have  now  to  relate,  occurred  in  the  fifth  year  of 
^Ella's  reign.  That  would  refer  .'Ella's  usurpation  to  A.D.  862  or  863,  two 
or  three  years  only  after  the  dream  of  Ragnar's  son.  Asser  implies  that 
iElla  only  acquired  a  crown  in  A.D.  867,  and  he  has  been  followed  (as 
usual)  by  the  AS.  Chr.     But  his  statement  is  not  quite  definite. 

2  Matt.  West,  a.  870. 


&THELWULF.  3^7 

allowed,  of  connecting  the  death  of  Ragnar  with  the  coming  of 
the  great  invasion  which  now,  in  the  year  866,  about  the  same 
time  that  Robert  the  Strong  was  finding  a  grave  by  the  banks 
of  Sarthe,  set  sail  for  our  shores.1 

Without,  then,  attempting  to  square  tradition  with  history,  let 
us  take  a  glance  at  the  condition  of  England  at  this  time,  and 
at  the  phase  which  the  Viking  attacks  on  this  country  had 
reached. 

Ecgberht  saw  the  beginning  of  the  evil,  but  only  that.  We 
know  how,  even  before  the  hostile  fleets  began  once  more  to 
steer  for  the  English  coasts,  he  had,  in  consultation  with  his 
Witan,  devised  schemes  for  their  protection  :  how,  a  couple  of 
years  after,  an  expedition,  presumably  sent  from  Ireland,  came 
to  the  Kentish  coast,  making  its  way  to  a  convenient  island 
near  the  coast  (Sheppey);  as  years  before  Viking  fleets  had  first 
settled  upon  Lindisfarne  or  Lambay,  as  at  the  same  time  other 
Viking  fleets  were  settling  upon  Noirmoutiers  or  Oissel.  The 
raiders  grew  bolder,  though  they  met  at  first  with  slight 
success ;  until  at  length,  allied  with  the  Cornishmen,  and  with 
very  definite  intentions  of  conquest  and  settlement  (after  the 
Irish  pattern),  they  dared  to  encounter  the  great  King  of 
Wessex  at  the  head  of  his  troops,  and  were  decisively  defeated 
at  Hengston.  Soon  after  which  success  Ecgberht  died  and 
was  gathered  to  his  valiant  forefathers. 

^Ethelwulf  succeeded.  In  his  reign  the  Viking  attacks  on 
England  took  a  new  complexion.  Some  of  them  now  came 
(as  appears)  not  from  Irish  Norsemen,  but  from  the  Danes  who 
were  plundering  and  settling  all  down  the  Frisian  and  Frankish 
shores.     The   first    of    the    attacks    which    we    may   almost 

1  For  other  authorities  which  support  this  connection  see  Lappenberg 
Gesch.  Engl.  i.  299  ( I'r.  ii.  31).  Torfaeus  clearly  confounds  Ragnar  with 
Thorgisl. 


368  THE  GREAT  ARMY. 

certainly  assign  to  these  Continental  Vikings  is  that  attack  upon 
the  marsh  country  which  took  place  in  840  or  841,  following 
which  is  the  still  more  important  raid  which  the  Chronicle 
describes  as  a  great  slaughter  in  London  and  Rochester,  in 
the  year  842.  The  same  fleet  attacked  Quentovic:1  no  doubt, 
therefore,  it  was  sailing  through  the  English  Channel  and  falling 
upon  the  richest  towns  on  either  coast.  Far  more  terrible 
were  the  doings  of  the  fleet  despatched  by  Rorik  from  Frisia 
nine  years  later,  namely  in  851 — a  monstrous  fleet  of  350  sail, 
which  ruined  London,  killed  Berhtwulf,  King  of  Mercia,  and 
was  at  last  defeated  by  the  King  of  Wessex,  at  Ockley. 

This  common  suffering  seemed  to  bring  the  English  kingdom 
nearer  to  its  neighbour  of  France  and  make  us  partakers  in  the 
affairs  of  all  Christendom.  iEthelwulf  the  king  had  beside 
some  natural  leanings  to  what  one  may  call  cosmopolitanism — 
towards  that  policy  (which  the  popes  often  represented)  which 
looked  upon  all  Western  Christendom  as  essentially  one  state, 
bound  by  the  same  laws,  which  (du  reste)  were  to  be  determined 
rather  by  the  ecclesiastical  bodies  in  their  midst  than  by  the 
caprice  of  the  monarch  or  even  the  advice  of  his  lay  council. 
It  was  this  leaning — a  leaning  more,  perhaps,  than  a  direct 
policy — which  made  the  Wessex  king  despatch  his  beloved  son 
y£lfred  to  Rome  with  presents  to  the  Pope,  and  made  him 
afterwards  undertake  the  same  journey  himself.  He  stayed  at 
the  Court  of  Charles  the  Bald  and  there  beheld  the  beautiful 
young  daughter  of  the  king.  Judith  was  then  a  mere  child,  not 
yet,  we  will  hope,  the  wanton  which  she  became  in  after-years. 
yEthelwulf  was  forty,  she  was  fifteen ;  but  otherwise  the 
marriage  was  suitable  enough.  It  would  have  been  hard  for 
Charles  to  find  his  daughter  a  royal  spouse  elsewhere  than  in 
England  \  for  Carlings,  her  uncles  or  her  cousins,  sat  upon  all 

*  Ante,  p.  278. 


^ETHEL  WULF  AND  JUDITH.  369 

the  thrones  of  the  Continent.1  Accordingly,  on  the  return  of 
^Ethelwulf  from  Rome,  in  856,  the  marriage  between  him  and 
Judith  was  celebrated  with  great  pomp  by  Hincmar  in  the 
royal  palace  of  Verberie. 

This  single  result  of  yEthelwulf's  cosmopolitan  leanings  was 
unfortunate  :  had  very  nearly  proved  disastrous.  A  section  of 
the  English  leaders,  ealdormen  and  thanes — we  have  already 
seen  how  through  jealousy  of  a  French  queen,  or  for  some 
other  cause,2  they  made  a  party  and  chose  iEthelbald,  the 
crown  prince,  as  king  ;  and  when  ^Ethelwulf  returned  he  was 
confronted  with  the  accomplished  fact  of  a  rebellion,  ^Ethel- 
bald  having  actually  assumed  the  sovereignty.  Here  was  a 
condition  of  affairs  which  seemed  to  reproduce  the  troubles  of 
the  Frankish  Empire  some  six-and-twenty  years  earlier.  Once 
more  a  second  marriage  with  a  young  wife  the  cause  of  it,  the 
stepson  at  the  head  of  the  rebellion :  and  the  young  wife  in  each 
case,  so  it  chances,  has  the  same  name,  Judith.  No  wonder  that 
historians,  who  love  parallels,  have  seen  in  Ecgberht  a  lesser 
Charlemagne  and  in  ^Ethelwulf  the  counterpart  in  character 
of  Charlemagne's  son,  Lewis  the  Pious. 

But  mark  how  the  English  moderation  and  spirit  of  com- 
promise overcame  the  danger.  ^Ethelwulf  with  a  noble 
Entsagen  consented  to  yield  the  better  half  of  his  kingdom  to 
his  new-crowned  son,  and  for  the  rest  of  his  reign  to  content 
himself  with  the  kingdom  of  Kent,  while  ^Ethelbald  ruled  in 
Wessex.     Certainly  the  Viking   terror  which  was,   so   to  say, 

1  On  this  account  there  is  no  reason  for  supposing,  as  Green  does 
{Conquest  of  England,  p.  82),  that  this  marriage  of  iEthelwulf  and  Judith 
ratified  any  sort  of  alliance  between  Charles  and  the  King  of  Wessex 
against  the  Vikings. 

2  If  ^ESelwulf,  previous  to  his  second  marriage,  had  repudiated  Osburh, 
the  mother  of  his  sons,  there  would  of  course  be  reason  enough  for  the 
rebellion  of  yESelbald.  On  this  doubtful  point  Freeman  accepts  the  theory 
of  repudiation  {Diet.  Nat.  B.  s.v.  ALlfted),  which  Pauli  decisively  rejects. 
Alfred  the  Great  (Wright),  p.  88. 

25 


yjo  THE  GREAT  ARMY. 

hovering  round  all  the  English  coast  (north  in  the  marsh 
country  as  well  as  here  in  Wessex  and  Kent)  should  have 
disposed  all  patriotic  spirits  to  seek  a  compromise  which  might 
leave  the  forces  of  the  kingdom  unimpaired. 

.  _  For  all  this  time  the  outward  danger  was  assuming 

A  D     851. 

fresh  and  more  threatening  forms.     The  very  year 

of  that  great  victory  at  Ockley  saw  an  event  of  still  greater 

significance  and  of  exactly  an  opposite  tendency,  that  is  to  say 

the  first  wintering  of  the  Danes  on  English  soil,  on  the  island 

of   Thanet.      We    have   already    spoken    of    that 

event,    have   compared   it  with  like  events  upon 

the  Continent  and  measured  its  significance.     Two  years  after 

the  English  made  a  desperate  attempt  to  drive  the  strangers 

forth.     But  they  failed.     And  in  855  or  856  the 

Vikings  changed  their  winter  quarters  from  Thanet 

to  Sheppey.     They  were  now  under  the   command  of  three 

leaders  whose  names  were   to   be  words   of  terror   in    every 

English  household  in  the  years  to  come — three  sons  of  Ragnar 

Lodbrok  they  are  called,  Halfdan,  Ivar,  and  Ubbe. J 

There   were   no   further   attacks   of    importance   until   the 

coming  of  Weland's  fleet  to  the  Wessex  coast  in  the  interval 

of  its   awaiting   the   completion  of  a  compact   with  Charles 

the  Bald  for  the  attack  upon  the  Vikings  of  the 
A.  D  860 

Seine.    Weland's  fleet  took,  as  we  saw,  Winchester 

by  storm,  but  was  afterwards  defeated.     This  was  in  860. 

Meantime  yEthelwulf  had  died  (858)  and  been  suc- 
ceeded by  ^Ethelbald.  During  the  short  reign  of  this  king 
the  land  had  peace.  But  now  the  time  drew  near  when  there 
was  to  be  a  complete  change  in  the  character  of  the  Viking 
attacks  on  England.  Remember  that  by  this  time  large  tracts 
of  country  in  Scotland  and  Ireland  had  been  subdued  by  the 

'  AS.  Chron.  853  ;  Ann.  Lindisf.  855  (Pertz,  xix.  506). 


AVANT-GARDE  OF  THE  'ARMY:  371 

Norsemen,  who  had  formed  almost  a  new  nation  in  Caithness, 
in  the  Orkneys,  the  Hebrides,  and  in  Ireland.  It  was  time  for 
the  Danes  to  try  the  same  policy.  Among  the  Danes  on  the 
Continent,  in  Frisia  and  in  Francia  (these  last  most  of  all 
whom  Charles's  continual  harassing  had  begun  to  wear  out), 
the  news  passed  round  that  a  great  expedition  was  fitting  out 
for  England. 

III. 

An  avant-garde  of  the  great  invading  army  came  to  Thanet 
in  865  and  wintered  there.  The  men  of  Kent  were  unable 
to  meet  them  in  the  field;  but  they  did  what  the 
King  of  France  had  long  been  constrained  to  do — 
they  offered  to  purchase  their  retreat  by  a  heavy  ransom.  The 
Vikings  agreed;  but  while  the  ransom  was  collecting  they 
stole  from  their  camp  and  marched  through  the  greater  part 
of  Kent  plundering  and  burning.1  Never  before  had  the 
northern  pirates  found  the  way  so  open  before  them.  ^Ethel- 
wulf,  as  we  have  seen,  had  been  dead  since  858 — two  years 
after  his  second  marriage.  His  eldest  son,  ^Ethelbald,  who  had 
nearly  brought  such  trouble  upon  the  country,  was  dead  also : 
he  was,  we  may  believe,  no  incapable  ruler,  for  during  his 
short  reign  the  English  were  untroubled  by  Viking  attacks. 
^Ethelberht,  the  third  son,  was  nearing  the  end  of  his  reign. 
He,  too,  was  to  be  spared  the  great  coming  trouble.  For  this 
fleet  which  came  to  Kent  in  865-6  was  no  more  than  an  avant- 
garde  of  a  far  more  imposing  one  which  in  the  latter  year  had 
been  collecting  for  the  invasion  of  our  country.  Vikings  from 
the  Rhine  mouth,  Vikings  from  the  Scheld,  the  Somme,  the 
Seine,  drew  together  at  the  sound  of  the  preparations  which 

1  The  likeness  of  this  proceeding  to  that  of  Weland's  Danes  in  France 
(a.d.  860)  is  to  be  noted  ;  as,  in  truth,  are  the  constant  parallelisms  in  the 
history  of  the  Continental  and  English  Vikings. 


372  THE  GREAT  ARMY. 

were  going  forward  among  the  Danes  of  the  Continent.  They 
were  growing  tired  of  their  monotonous  life.  Here  was  a  new 
and  a  great  adventure,  the  veritable  conquest  (for  this  they 
promised  themselves)  of  one  of  the  great  states  of  Christendom. 

From  the  accounts  which  our  chronicles  give  us  we  should 
gather  that  up  till  now  the  great  majority  of  the  Viking  raids  in 
England  had  been  directed  against  the  southern  counties. 
But  the  chronicles  of  the  north  have  not  been  so  well  pre- 
served, and  it  is  quite  possible  that  a  number  of  attacks  in 
the  north  have  gone  unrecorded.1  From  a  hint  here  and 
there  we  may  gather  that  Northumbria  had  been  subject  to 
them.  She  had  long  been  in  a  most  anarchical  condition. 
One  of  her  kings  about  this  time  is  reported  (though  not  on 
very  good  authority)  to  have  been  slain  by  the  Vikings.  How 
the  middle  parts  of  England  had  fared  we  cannot  tell.  There 
is  only  one  recorded  attack  upon  the  marsh  country  up  to  the 
year  at  which  we  are  now  arrived,  866. 

Certainly  one  would  say  that  no  part  of  England  lay  more 
inviting  to  attack  than  the  rich  flat  region  of  the  east  coast, 
where  many  river  mouths  and  arms  of  the  sea  led  far  inland, 
in  those  days  led  the  way  to  the  great  lagoons  of  the  marsh 
country.  For  where  now  lie  level  fields  furrowed  by  the 
plough,  neatly  bordered  by  their  long,  straight  dykes,  then 
lay  great  shallow  inland  lakes — beautiful  lakes,  pulcherrimce 
paludeSy  Henry  of  Huntingdon  calls  them,  who  knew  them 
well ;  beautiful  and  lonely,  the  haunt  of  the  snipe  and  bittern. 
And  on  the  borders  of  the  lakes,  or  rising  like  islands  out  of 
them,  stood  some  of  the  greatest  religious  houses  of  the 
England  of  those  days,  Bardeney,  Croyland,  Peterborough, 
Ely,  Huntingdon — each  visible  from  one  or  more  of  the  others, 


1  Simeon  of  Durham  records  no  Viking  attacks  between  the  first  attack 
on  Lindisfarne  and  the  coming  of  the  Army. 


THE  'ARMY'  IN  EAST  ANGLIA.  373 

and  thus  seeming  to  entice  the  adventurer  farther  and  farther 
into  the  interior. 

It  was  from  this  eastern  coast  that  men,  in  the 
autumn  of  866,  saw  approaching,  with  all  sails 
set,  the  largest  fleet  which  had  yet  ever  made  for  this  country. 
Henceforth  these  new  Viking  invaders  always  in  the  Chronicle 
go  by  the  name  of  the  Army  or  the  Great  Army  ;  and,  in  truth, 
their  course  was  as  disastrous  as  ever  in  modern  days  was  the 
course  of  the  Grande  Armee  in  Germany  or  Russia.  It  is  the 
deeds  of  this  army,  and  the  answering  achievements  which 
these  deeds  called  forth  from  the  English,  which  make  the 
most  remarkable  page  in  our  history,  between  the  rise  of  the 
house  of  Ecgberht  and  the  Norman  Conquest.  Ivar x  and  Ubbe 
were  among  the  leaders  in  this  great  fleet.  Had  they  come  to 
exact  vengeance  on  the  Northumbrians  for  the  death  of  their 
father  ?  We  cannot  tell.  If  so,  why  did  they  settle  down  for 
the  winter  of  866-7  in  the  East  Anglian  country  to  which  they 
first  came  ?  Yet,  if  they  had  no  special  reason  for  attacking 
Northumbria,  why  did  they  leave  the  rich  churches  and 
religious  houses  which  lay  so  near  them,  and  undertake  a  long 
journey  to  the  north  ?  The  English  had  their  own  tradition 
of  the  cause  of  the  fall  of  the  Northumbrian  kingdom.2  Ac- 
cording to  this  story,  the  coming  of  the  Danes  was  the  work 
of  one  of  Osberht's  chief  thanes,  Bjorn  Butsecarl,  and  he 
wrought  this  treachery  to  his  country  to  take  vengeance  on  the 
king,  who  had  violated  his  bed.  The  legend  is  met  with  too 
commonly  attaching  to  the  last  of  some  royal  race,  the  over- 
throw of  a  great  people  by  new  conquerors.  It  is  the  legend 
of  Roderic,  the  last  of  the  Visigoths.3     We  must  relegate  it 

1  Ivar  is  variously  styled  in  the  Saxon  Chron.  Inwaer  (A),  Ingwaer  (B), 
Inwer  (C),  Iwer  (D).  And  some  of  the  late  Icelandic  Sagas  of  Ragnar 
Lodbrok  have  made  two  persons  out  of  this  one.     See  Fornaldar  Sbgur. 

2  Geof.  Gaimar,  Fstoire,  v.  2591  sqq.  ;  Boeth.  Hist.  Scot. 

3  It  is  also  related  of  ^illa,  the  rival  of  Osberht,  cf.    Lappenberg,  o.c», 


374  THE  GREAT  ARMY. 

therefore  to  the  region  of  mythology.  Sooth  to  say,  no  remote 
reasons,  no  dramatic  incidents  are  necessary  to  account  for 
faction  and  treachery  in  the  Northumbria  of  those  days.  That 
once  famous  kingdom,  the  light  of  whose  learning  and  piety 
had  shone  over  the  whole  of  Europe,  had  for  more  than  a 
century  *  been  sinking  lower  and  lower  amid  contending  fac- 
tions, and  had  now  fallen  on  sad  and  evil  days.  Two  rival 
kings  claimed  the  suffrages  of  the  people,  Osberht,  the  legitimate 
king,  and  that  iElla  2  whom  tradition  points  to  as  the  murderer 
of  Ragnar  Lodbrok.  Too  much  distracted  by  internal  troubles 
to  have  an  eye  for  what  was  going  on  elsewhere,  the  inhabitants 
of  Northumbria  seem  to  have  known  nothing  of  the  approach 
of  the  Great  Army  till  it  was  almost  upon  them.  The  Vikings 
had  followed  the  practice  which  they  had  long  used  in  France  ; 
they  took  horses  from  the  peasantry  round  about,  and  with 
these  they  made  their  march  northwards,  probably  along  the 
old  Roman  road,  Ermine  Street,  which  leads  up  to  Brough 
Ferry  over  the  Humber.  They  crossed  the  Humber  un- 
opposed, and  by  the  first  of  November,  867,  they  had  taken 
possession  of  York.  All  over  the  country  spread  their  bands, 
plundering  and  buming.3 

.»     ,    „„~       At  the  sight  of  this  foreign  danger  the  two  rival 
March,  868.     .  °  . 

kings  composed  their  differences  and  united  their 

armies  for  the  sake  of  laying  siege  to  the  Danes  in  the  capital. 

Then  it  was,  as  I  judge,  that  the  Danes  put  in  practice  their 

favourite  manoeuvre  of  the  sham  flight  in  the  midst  of  a  battle. 

They  came  out  before  the  town  to  engage  the  Northumbrians ; 

i.  300,  note.  This  fact  gives  it,  certainly,  more  and  not  less  verisimilitude. 
The  Codrinus  of  the  story  would  be,  as  Lappenberg  says,  Gotrum 
(Guthorm),  who  figures  so  much  in  the  myths  of  this  period — of  Rollo  ? 
(Dudo),  and  Harald  ?  (Haralds  Saga). 

1  Stubbs  points  out  how  of  the  eight  kings  of  Northumbria  who  reigned 
between  a.d.  737  and  796,  not  one  died  a  natural  death  upon  the  throne, 
Const,  Hist.,  vol.  i.  2  '  Ungecyndne  cyning,'  AS.  Chr. 

3  AS.  Chr.,  866  ;  Sim.  Dur.  H.  D.  E.  c.  vi. 


TAKING  OF  YORK.  375 

but  anon,  seeming  to  give  way,  they  fled  within  the  walls  of 
the  city.  The  English  pursued,  their  two  kings — as  one  is 
glad  to  see — leading  them.  Then,  when  a  number  had  got 
within  the  city,  the  Danes  rallied  :  they  shut  to  the  gates  and 
fell  upon  the  band  which  had  got  within.  It  was  a  massacre  ; 
all  the  English  perished,  among  them  Osberht  and  ^Ella,  the 
rival  kings  of  Northumbria.1  And,  save  in  name,  the  English 
kingdom  of  Southern  Northumbria  (Deira)  ceased  to  exist. 

After  this  victory  the  Danes  spread  northward  and  plundered 
as  far  as  the  Tyne,  and  the  Northumbrians  of  the  northern 
division  (Bernicia)  made  peace  without  striking  a  blow.  An 
Englishman,  Ecgberht,  was  placed  as  king  of  this  portion  of  the 
land.  Later  in  the  year,  the  Great  Army,  abandoning  all  care 
about  its  fleet,  set  out  upon  a  long  march  into  the  interior  of 
England.2  It  was  a  new  sight  for  Englishmen,  this  serried 
array  of  well-drilled  soldiers,  armed  (as  no  doubt  they  were) 
with  all  the  latest  fashion  of  armour,  offensive  or  defensive, 
known  in  the  Frankish  Empire — a  perpetual  army,  a  standing 
army  of  veterans,  to  which  they  had  nothing  to  oppose  except 
their  militia,  called  the  fyrd.  Unopposed,  the  Vikings  marched 
into  Mercia  and  set  themselves  down  for  winter  quarters  right 
in  the  centre  of  England,  at  Nottingham.  Very  different  was 
the  condition  of  the  March-Kingdom  (Mercia)  in  the  politics 
of  England  from  that  which  it  held  when  the  first  Viking  ship 
had  touched  the  English  coast.  Then  the  victorious  Offa  sat 
upon  the  Mercian  throne ;  the  king  of  Wessex  had  humbly 
sought  his  friendship  and  had  obtained  his  help  to  drive  from 
the  kingdom  his  rival  Ecgberht.  Since  then  Ecgberht  had 
returned,   reigned  gloriously,  and  died.      A  century's  rivalry 

1  The  Norse  Saga  makes  ^Ella  receive  the  punishment  of  the  blood- 
eagle. 

2  Asser  Vita  sElf.  and  Chron.  s.  a.  As  almost  all  the  history  of  this 
period  comes  originally  from  Asser,  it  will  not  be  necessary  to  multiply 
reierences. 


376  THE  GREAT  ARMY. 

between  Mercia  and  Wessex  had  ended  victoriously  for  the 
latter,  and  now  it  was  the  turn  of  the  Mercian  king  to  crave 
the  friendship  of  his  brother  of  Wessex. 

The  king,  Burgred  by  name,  had  before  now 
obtained  the  help  of  ^Ethelwulf,  the  West  Saxon 
king,  against  the  Welsh,  his  neighbours.1  The  disturbance,  the 
sense  of  insecurity,  which  the  pirate  raids  on  England  had  already 
awakened,  roused  the  slumbering  fires  of  rebellion  among  the 
Welsh.  We  saw  how  an  early  Viking  band  allied  itself  with  the 
Cornishmen  (the  West  Welsh)  against  Ecgberht.  Following 
that  precedent,  the  North  Welsh,  the  Welsh  proper,  rose 
against  Burgred ;  Burgred  had  appealed  for  assistance,  as 
against  a  common  danger,  to  the  West  Saxon  ruler,  and  the 
two  kings  marched  together  to  chastise  the  Britons.  The 
political  alliance  was  supplemented  by  an  alliance  of  blood,  for 
Burgred  married  ^Ethelswyth,  the  daughter  of  Wessex. 

Now,  in  this  new  strait  brought  by  the  invasion  of  the  Danes, 
and  against  a  new  and  common  danger  to  England,  the  Mer- 
cian king  appealed  once  more  to  his  Southern  neighbour. 
His  father-in-law,  the  two  elder  of  his  kingly  brothers-in-law, 
had  worn  the  crown  and  died.  The  third,  ^Ethelred,  now 
reigned  in  Wessex ;  and  by  his  side  stood  the  secundarius  of 
the  kingdom,  his  next  brother,  Alfred,  of  whom  England,  and 
the  Danes  too,  were  to  hear  much  in  the  coming  years.  At 
present  he  was  twenty  years  of  age,  and  had  just  married 
the  daughter  of  Ealdorman  ^Ethelred  of  Mercia. 

The  West  Saxon  princes  assembled  their  troops,  marched 
northward,  and  united  their  army  with  Burgred's  before  the 
walls  of  Nottingham.  But,  alas  !  the  English  were  hopelessly 
ill-provided  with  the  machinery  and  the  knowledge  for  the 
conduct  of  a  siege.     Arts  which  had  been  making  no  small 

"  AS.  Chron.  853. 


VIKINGS  IN  LINCOLNSHIRE.  377 

advance  on  the  Continent,  now  that  the  Northmen  had  learned 
to  make  their  camps  impregnable  and  Charles  had  begun  to 
fortify  his  river  banks,  were  strange  to  them.  The  Danes  were 
most  of  them  fresh  from  the  continent  and  from  the  lessons  to 
be  learnt  there.  They  made  themselves  unassailable  behind 
the  walls  of  Nottingham,  and  lay  awaiting  the  result.  Still, 
a  blockade  was  always  open  to  the  English,  and  no  help  was 
likely  to  come  to  the  invaders. 

The  English  armies  sat  down  before  Nottingham,  meaning 
to  besiege  it  after  this  manner.  This  time  the  English  leaders 
showed  no  more  perseverance  or  determination  than  the 
Vikings  had  been  accustomed  to  meet  with  in  Francia.  They 
offered  just  the  same  terms  which  Charles  the  Bald  would  have 
offered.  When  the  Vikings  on  the  Seine  or  the  Loire  were 
hard  pressed,  the  worst  lot  they  need  dread  was  leave  to  retire 
into  Frisia  or  to  any  other  spot  not  in  the  territory  of  Charles 
the  Bald.  With  a  like  weakness  of  policy,  of  the  Danes  in 
Nottingham,  when  famine  obliged  them  to  come  to  terms,  no 
more  was  required  than  that  they  should  retreat  out  of  Mercia. 

Whereupon  they  returned  once  more  to  York. 
There  they  were  complete  masters  of  the  country. 
And  for  one  year,  869-870,  the  Vikings  remained  in  Northum- 
bria,  exacting  tribute,  and  settling  to  some  extent  the  govern- 
ment of  the  kingdom.     Some  part  of  the  army  even  seems  to 
have  begun  to  colonize  here. 

In  870  a  portion  of  the  army  was  again  on  Mercian  ground. 
It  sailed  from  York  to  Lindsay — the  marshy  district  in  South 
Lincolnshire.  And  presently  began  the  plundering  of  the 
abbeys  and  cathedrals  of  the  marsh  country.  Bardeney  was 
plundered  and  burnt,  and  all  its  community  of  monks  was 
slain.  Meantime,  another  contingent  of  the  Great  Army 
marched  by  land  to  East  Anglia,  and  took  winter  quarters  at 
Thetford.     The  ravages  of  the  Lincoln  army  continued.     It 


378  THE  GREAT  ARMY, 

was  in  Mercian  territory ;  but  Burgred,  we  may  guess,  feeling 
how  impossible  it  was  for  him  to  relieve  these  outlying  por- 
tions of  his  kingdom,  chose  rather  to  look  the  other  way  and 
let  the  plunderings  go  on.  We  have  a  somewhat  minute 
account  of  the  doings  of  the  Vikings  in  the  marsh  country. 
Unfortunately,  the  source  is  worthless — the  well-known  suppo- 
sitious Ingulf  of  Croyland.  According  to  that  account,  which 
we  give  as  narrative,  not  as  history,  Lincolnshire  found  among 
her  own  great  men,  thanes  and  prelates,  four  champions,  three 
earls  of  renown,  Algar,  Morcar,  and  Osgod ;  Brother  Toli  of 
Croyland,  who,  in  earlier  days,  had  been  a  thane  and  a  famous 
man  of  war,  but  had  now  just  taken  the  tonsure.  Toli  left  his 
cloisier  once  more  for  the  field,  and  brought  with  him  a  host 
of  men  who  had  fled  to  Cro>land  Abbey.  In  all,  a  force  of 
about  8,000  men  assembled  under  the  English  standards. 
The  Danish  host — a  part  only  of  the  Great  Army — was  far  less 
numerous  ;  but  it  contained  only  men  of  approved  valour,  used 
to  desperate  straits,  men  who  had  often  retrieved  the  day  of 
battle  when  all  seemed  lost.  Were  it  not  so,  rashly  indeed 
had  they  broken  down  their  bridges  and  burnt  their  boats,  to 
find  themselves  in  the  midst  of  an  enemy's  country,  where 
defeat  should  mean  annihilation. 

On  St.  Maurice's  day  (Sept.  22),  870,  the  armies 

AD  870  1 

joined  battle.  It  was  a  desperate  fight ;  three  of 
the  Viking  leaders  fell  and  a  multitude  of  lesser  men.  At  last 
the  Danes  were  slowly  driven  back  to  their  camp.  But  here 
they  made  a  stand ;  they  set  up  that  impregnable  shield-burg  of 
theirs,  and  night  fell  while  they  were  still  unbroken.  And  now 
was  shown  the  profit  of  that  unquenchable  valour  which  would 
not  yield  though  the  odds  seemed  desperate ;  so  different  from 
the  hare-like  timidity,  starting  at  every  shadow,  which  had 
begun  to  possess  the  soldiers  of  Charles  the  Bald.  Hopeless 
seemed  the  case  with  this  small  band  of  Danes  when  they 


DESTRUCTION  OF  MONASTERIES.  379 

measured  themselves  against  the  numbers  of  their  adversaries 
and  thought  of  to-morrow's  dawn  and  the  renewal  of  the  attack. 
Yet  that  day's  long  stand  had  saved  them.  For  that  very  night 
beheld  a  fresh  army  marching  into  their  camp — a  fresh  army, 
new  landed  from  the  coasts  of  France  or  Frisia.  Five  kings 
commanded  in  it,  Guthrum,  Baegseg,  Osketil,1  Halfdan,  and 
Hamond,1  and  many  earls.  The  troops  were  no  doubt  the 
flower  of  the  Viking  armies  on  the  continent,  the  most 
adventurous,  the  most  eager  for  conquest.  Very  different 
was  the  confidence  of  the  Danes  when  morning  dawned 
from  what  it  had  been  at  nightfall.  They  did  not  wait 
to  be  attacked,  but  sallied  forth  against  the  English,  whose 
turn  it  was  now  to  remain  on  the  defensive.  And  the 
English  did  remain  unshaken  for  many  hours,  as  at  Hastings 
and  Waterloo.  But  as  the  afternoon  wore  on,  the  Danes  had 
recourse  once  more  to  that  manoeuvre  of  theirs  which  had 
already  decided  the  day  at  York.  Like  Duke  William's 
Normans  at  a  later  day,  they  seemed  to  turn  and  fly,  and 
like  Harald's  soldiers,  the  troops  of  Morcar  and  Alfgar  were 
drawn  from  their  defence  to  follow  the  fugitives.  Then  all 
was  lost.  The  Vikings  turned  and  fell  upon  the  English  with 
unappeasable  fury.  Half  went  down  at  once.  Algar  and  Toli 
were  able  to  gather  a  small  band  and  make  their  shield-burg 
upon  a  neighbouring  mound.  It  availed  them  little.  They 
could  not  hold  out  against  the  Viking  arms,  and  the  English 
army  was  almost  totally  destroyed.  A  few  saved  themselves 
by  flight  to  a  neighbouring  wood  and  escaped  under  the 
shadow  of  night.3 

And  now  the   further   destruction  of  monasteries  ensued. 

1  So  the  narrative,  but  Osketil  and  Hamund  (Agmund)  are  probably  a 
pure  mistake,  caused  by  following  Simeon  of  Durham,  /.  c. 

2  This  narrative,  as  we  have  said  above,  cannot  be  accepted  as  history. 
But  there  is  considerable  verisimilitude  in  it. 


380  THE  GREA  T  ARM V. 

Bardeney  we  know  had  fallen.  Croyland's  turn  came  next. 
Fugitives  from  the  battle  not  far  off  brought  to  the  monks  the 
terrible  news  of  the  English  defeat.  The  monks  had  time  to 
escape  if  they  would.  The  Abbot  Theodore  and  some  of  the 
elder  monks,  it  is  said,  chose  rather  to  suffer  martyrdom  at 
their  posts — like  Blaithmac  of  old  on  Iona,  like  Gunhard,  the 
Bishop  of  Nantes.1  As  they  were  in  the  act  of  celebrating  the 
mass  (so  goes  the  story)  the  Danes  burst  upon  them ;  King 
Osketil  hewed  down  the  abbot;  all  the  rest  of  the  monks 
were  slain.  Only  one  little  boy  was  saved  by  a  Viking  earl, 
Sidroc.  He  is  the  one  supposed  to  give  an  account  of  the 
scene. 

From  Croyland  the  towers  of  Peterborough  or  Medhamp- 
stead  beckon  invitingly  across  the  marshes,  and  thither  the 
Vikings  now  proceeded.  They  brought  the  siege  artillery  of 
those  days  against  the  walls  of  the  abbey,  which  were  soon 
broken  down.  The  abbot  and  all  the  monks  were  slain. 
Worse  almost  than  the  robbery  and  the  burning  of  the  ancient 
pile  (a  burning  which  lasted  fourteen  days)  was  the  destruction 
of  the  library  which  it  contained,  of  who  knows  what  precious 
materials  for  history,  unrecoverable  now.  From  Peterborough 
the  army  went  to  Huntingdon,  and  from  Huntingdon  to 
Cambridge.  In  the  first  was  an  abbey,  in  the  second  was  a 
bishop's  palace ;  both  were  burned  to  the  ground. 

Sad  indeed  must  have  been  the  sight  of  these  fires  flaring 
over  the  'beautiful  marshes'  which  lay  all  around.  From 
Cambridge  the  Vikings  could  see,  rising  out  of  the  surrounding 
waters,  Ely,  an  island  comparable  in  size  to  the  Isle  of  Man,  a 
real  island  in  those  days  up  to  which  the  sea  spread ;  though 
the  water  was  shallow  and  brackish,  and  from  its  shallowness 
haunted  by  an  abundance  of  eels,  from  which  the  island  took 

1  See  p.  280. 


DESTRUCTION  OF  MONASTERIES.  381 

its  name.  We  have  two  pictures  of  this  monastery  :  one  from 
more  than  a  hundred  years  before  this  onslaught  of  the  Danes, 
the  other  an  equal  distance  after  it  ;  in  each  the  island 
monastery  stands  out  for  a  moment  clearly  and  pleasantly 
from  the  mists  of  the  past.  The  Ely  monastery  was  built 
by  Queen  ^Ethelthryth  (St.  Audrey),  the  virgin  wife  of  King 
Ecgfnth  of  Northumbria.  When  she  retired  altogether  from 
the  world,  she  set  about  raising  this  shrine.  It  was  in 
East  Anglia ;  she  was  an  East  Anglian  princess.  When 
yEthelthryth  died  they  desired  to  bury  her  in  her  cloister  in  a 
stone  coffin  as  befitted  her  rank.  But  there  were  no  stones 
upon  the  island  large  enough  for  the  purpose.  Accordingly 
some  of  the  monks  (monasteries  were  for  both  sexes  in  those 
days)  '  entered  a  ship,  and  came  to  a  small  abandoned  city 
which  in  the  language  of  the  English  is  called  Grantaceaster,' 
and  outside  the  city  walls  they  found  a  white  marble  coffin, 
most  beautifully  wrought  and  covered  with  a  lid  of  the  same 
kind  of  marble.  Grantaceaster  (we  judge  by  its  termination) 
must  once  have  been  a  Roman  town,  now  long  since  ruined, 
and  rediscovered,  so  to  say,  by  these  Ely  monks  in  the  early 
years  of  the  eighth  century,  who  had  rowed  over  thither  from 
their  island.  Let  the  undergraduate  of  to-day  who  '  tools ' 
over  to  Ely  bear  in  mind  this  picture  of  Cambridge  (or 
Grantchester  if  you  will  *)  with  its  ruined  and  deserted  walls, 
lying  beside  the  great  lagoon ;  and  Ely  rising  up  visible 
sixteen  miles  off  out  of  the  water. 

Since  that  date  Cambridge  had,  as  we  have  seen,  gotten  its 
bishop's  palace,  which  was  now  destined  to  be  burned  by  the 
Danes.  But  the  waters  stood  and  were  to  stand  for  many 
long  years  reflecting  the  walls  and  towers  of  Ely  on  their 
bosom.      For  the  second  picture  which  comes  one  hundred 

1  Cambridge  is  generally  Grantabricge,  after  it  has  become  a  Saxon  town, 


382  THE  GREAT  ARMY. 

and  fifty  years  or  so  after  the  Danish  raid  is  that  far  more 
familiar  one,  which  all  the  history-books  give  us,  of  the  chanting 
voices  of  the  monks  of  Ely  sounding  pleasantly  over  the  waters 
to  King  Cnut  as  he  rowed  thereby. 

Merie  sangen  the  muneches  binnen  Ely 
Tha  Cnut  ching  rew  Serby.1 

This  too  is  a  picture  which  can  never  be  realized  again. 

And  now  we  return  to  the  Great  Army.  No  reliable  account 
which  we  can  recover  gives  us  the  confused  scene  of  blood 
and  wrath  which  marked  the  fall  of  Ely,  the  last  of  the  five 
great  monasteries  which  it  assaulted.  Meantime  we  have 
left  upon  one  side  the  other  Viking  camp  at  Thetford  which, 
so  far  as  appears,  had  up  to  now  remained  pretty  quiet.  The 
English  had  madt  one  attack  upon  it;  but  they  were  driven 
off  and  lost  their  leader  Ealdorman  Ulfcetil.  The  Danes  in 
Ely  and  the  Danes  of  Thetford  were  both  in  the  dominions  of 
the  king  of  East  Anglia,  whose  name  (famous  above  all  the 
names  of  those  who  suffered  in  these  days)  was  Eadmund. 
This  Eadmund  has  grown  into  a  mythic  figure.  We  cannot 
now  tell  why  he,  above  all  who  suffered  martyrdom  from  the 
Danes,  should  have  been  held  in  such  honour — honour  to  the 
point  of  beatification  and  worship  as  an  immortal  almost 
immediately  after  his  death.  As  Carlyle  says,  '  What  Ead- 
mund's  specific  duties  were,  above  all  what  his  method  of 
discharging  them  with  such  results  was,  would  be  interesting  to 
know;  but  are  hot  very  discoverable  now.'  Endmund  had  carried 
on  his  government,  but  felt  himself  perhaps  since  that  victory 
of  the  Danes  over  Algar  and  Morcar  no  longer  able  to  cope 
with  the  invaders  with  any  chance  of  success.  At  last  the 
Thetford  army  under  Ivar  and  Ubbe  marched  farther  into  his 

1  Hist,  Alliens,  ii.  2§t 


EADMUND.  383 

territory.  We  are  told  that  the  king  came  out  to  fight  against 
them  and  was  defeated.1  We  know  at  any  rate  that  he  fell 
into  their  hands,  into  the  hands  of  the  two  sons  of  Ragnar, 
Ivar  and  Ubbe,  refusing  to  fo.sake  his  creed,  and  was  put  to 
death — with  cruel  tortures,  as  some  reported.  The  tradition  a 
century  later  ran  that  he  had  been  tied  to  a  tree  and  shot  to 
death  2 — an  English  S.  Sebastian;  or,  shall  we  say,  a  Christian 
Balder?  And  almost  immediately  after  his  death  the  devotion 
of  the  people  to  his  memory  began  to  show  itself :  first,  in  the 
innumerable  coins  with  the  legend  Sancti  Eadmiindi  which 
had  been  struck  in  his  honour  before  the  next  century  was 
many  years  old  ; 3  next  in  the  splendid  abbey  which  rose  over 
his  burial-place.  He  led  his  conquerors  captive.  The  great 
Danish  King  of  England,  Cnut,  came  to  adore  the  bones  of 
him  his  ancestors  had  tortured,  took  the  golden  diadem  from 
his  own  head  and  placed  it  on  the  tomb  of  the  saint.  Eadmund's 
abbey  became  among  the  three  or  four  greatest  in  England. 
Requiescat  in  pace.  Strange  that  we  shall  never  learn  the  title 
by  which  he  remained  thus  planted  in  the  hearts  of  his 
countrymen. 

IV. 

The  martyrdom  of  S.  Eadmund  was  the  only  important 
achievement  of  the  army  in  the  autumn  of  this  year,  870. 
According  to  the  book  of  the  passion  of  S.  Eadmund  it  took 
place  on  the  20th  of  November.  We  may  suppose  that  in 
the  cold  winter  months  the  Danes  remained  quietly  in  East 
Anglia  making  themselves  at  home  in  the  comfortable  East 
Anglian  farms  and  in  the  country  which  now  knew  no  other 

1  Asser,  p.  20  (Wise). 

2  Or  shot  at  with  arrows  and  finally  beheaded,  Abbo,  Vita  S.  Eadm. 
(A.D.  985). 

3  See  Cat.  Eng-  Coins  in  the  British  Museum,  C.  F.  Keary,  pp.  xxix, 
xxx,  97-137. 


384  THE  GREA  T  ARMY. 

lord.  But  early  in  the  following  year  they  set  out 
upon  a  new  field  of  conquest.  And  now  begins 
the  crisis  of  this  drama  of  the  invasion  of  the  Great  Army. 
For  now  they,  that  is  to  say  a  large  section  of  the  Army,1 
crossed  the  Thames  and  came  into  the  country  of  the  greatest 
of  the  English  kings — the  King  of  Wessex.  Mercia  was 
almost  at  their  disposal ;  Northumbria  and  East  Anglia  were 
conquered.  Should  Wessex  fall  the  whole  of  England  would 
be  theirs,  the  course  of  history  would  have  rolled  back, 
Christianity  would  have  been  driven  out  of  the  land,  the  days 
of  ^Ethelfrith  the  Fierce  or  of  Penda  would  have  returned. 

In  their  first  movements  the  Danes  showed  their  military 
skill.  They  crossed  the  Thames  at  a  point  nicely  chosen  to 
cut  the  kingdom  of  Wessex  in  two — to  double  the  difficulties  of 
^Ethelred  in  the  raising  of  an  opposing  army.  This  point  was 
Reading.2  There  was  a  castle,  say  small  castrum,  there  ;  and 
the  Danes  were  soon  able  to  fortify  themselves  sufficiently  to 
defy  the  English  attacks.  The  town  lies  upon  a  point  of  land 
at  the  junction  of  the  Thames  and  the  Kennet.  The  North- 
men drew  a  vallum  from  one  river  to  the  other.  I  have  said 
that  they  showed  good  generalship ;  but  we  must  make  the 
proviso  that  it  was  of  a  kind  in  conformity  with  their  usual 
tactics.  They  were  wont  to  think  always  of  attack,  little  of 
defence ;  little  of  securing  a  base,  or  of  their  commissariat. 
They  trusted  to  find  provision  for  their  troops  in  the  hostile 
country.  Nevertheless  in  the  present  case  the  river  served 
them  as  a  means  of  communication  with  their  fleet ;  as  a  line 
of  retreat  and  a  possible  source  of  supplies.  But  they  could 
hardly  have  told,  and  we  at  this  day  cannot  tell,  how  far  the 

x  Guthorm  did  not  take  part  in  this  first  invasion  of  Wessex. 

2  '  The  country  which  was  to  form  the  scene  of  the  coming  struggle  was 
the  square  rough  forest  country  for  which  the  abundance  of  bearroc  or  box 
trees  among  its  woodland  gained  the  name  of  Berkshire  '  (Green,  Conquest 
of  England,  p.  98). 


DANISH  CAMP  A  T  READING.  385 

river  could  be  relied  upon  as  a  means  of  transport  when,  for 
example,  the  summer  should  come  and  the  stream  run  low. 

The  West  Saxons  did  not  wait  long  to  attack  the  new 
invaders.  The  Berkshire  fyrd  under  Ealdorman  y-Ethelwulf 
caught,  at  Englefield,  a  body  that  had  ridden  into  the  next 
county  to  explore  and  forage,  and  gained  a  victory.  Soon  the 
word  came  that  the  king  was  coming,  and  anon  ^Ethelred  and 
Alfred,  with  such  forces  as  they  had  been  able  to  raise, 
marched  up  and  encamped  before  Reading.  They  did  not  at 
once  attack  the  stronghold ;  but  every  one  who  ventured  out 
was  slain,  and  the  Danes  were  cooped  up  like  wolves  in  a  hole. 
But  suddenly  the  gates  of  the  Danish  fort  opened,  the  Vikings 
rushed  forth,  and  a  furious  battle  began.  Before  long  the 
English  began  to  waver,  and  in  the  end  ^Ethelred  and  Alfred 
and  their  troops  were  driven  back  as  far  as  Wistley  Green,  and 
would  have  suffered  still  more  had  they  not  found  a  ford — just 
opposite  Windsor — which  was  unknown  to  the  Danes,  and  by 
that  escaped  across  the  river.1  An  ill  beginning.  Ealdorman 
^Ethelwulf,  who  had  just  before  triumphed  at  Englefield,  was 
killed  in  this  engagement.  Four  days  later  yEthelred  and 
yElfred  returned  with  fresh  levies.  They  were  determined  to 
try  another  battle  to  protect  this  portion  of  their  kingdom.  If 
they  lost  it  there  was  small  chance  that  on  this  side  of  Wessex 
they  would  be  able  to  make  a  further  stand.  Beyond  Selwood, 
no  doubt,  they  could  still  have  held  out  for  a  time.  But  Kent, 
Sussex,  Surrey,  Hampshire,  and  half  Wiltshire  would  fall  as 
completely  as  East  Anglia  had  fallen. 

The  Danes  had  already  advanced  westward  along  the  high 

chalk  ridge   of  Berkshire.     They  attached  equal   importance 

with  the  English  to  the  coming  battle ;  and  except  a  moderate 

1  '  E  Edelred  e  Elvereth 
Furent  chasces  a  Wisceslet 
Eo  est  un  gue  vers  Windesoveres ' 

(Geo!.  Gaimar,  Estoire  d,  £.,  2963,  sqq.). 

26 


386  THE  GREAT  ARMY. 

garrison  left  in  camp  we  may  believe  that  their  whole  force 
marched  to  the  field.  This  field  of  battle  was  a  place  called 
Ashdown,  lying  upon  the  chalk  downs  of  Berkshire.  In  two 
wings  the  Danish  army  was  drawn  up :  one  under  the  command  of 
the  two  kings  of  Northumbria  (kings  elect  as  it  were,  for  they  had 
hardly  yet  taken  possession)  Halfdan1  and  Baegsaeg;  the  other 
led  by  five  earls — Asbjorn,  Fraene,  Harald,  and  the  elder  and 
younger  Sihtric.  Wherefore  the  English  army  likewise  divided 
into  two.  One  division,  under  yEthelred,  faced  that  commanded 
by  the  kings ;  the  other,  under  the  Secundarius,  the  ^Etheling 
yElfred,  faced  the  wing  of  the  earls. 

The  Danes  had  chosen  the  best  position.  They  had  in  truth 
been  the  first  in  the  field,  and  already  lay  between  the  English 
army  and  its  base.  They  were,  too,  on  the  upper  slope  of  the 
down.  And  now  they  were  moving  downwards  through  the 
ihick  brushwood,2  shooting  their  arrows  and  hurling  their  spears 
before  them  as  they  advanced  to  the  charge.  Prince  Alfred 
was  alert.  But  when  he  looked  towards  the  king's  division, 
^)thelred  was  not  yet  there  ;  he  was,  in  fact,  hearing  mass,  and 
would  not  move  until  the  service  was  at  an  end. 3  Meantime 
the  Danes  were  drawing  nearer  and  nearer,  especially  that  wing 
which  stood  opposite  Alfred's  division.4  The  prince  could 
not  wait  longer  for  his  brother's  word  of  command.     On  his 

1  AS.  CAron.,  871.  I  do  not  know  why  Green  substitutes  Guthorm 
for  Halfdan  throughout  the  history  of  this  year,  o.  c.  p.  98. 

2  Of  box  ?     See  above. 

3  Historians  are  wont  to  be  very  sarcastic  over  this  scene.  But  it  may 
be  paralleled  from  the  history  of  Rome  in  her  greatest  days,  when  the 
general  of  the  Republic,  in  a  battle  against  the  /Etolians,  was  observed  to 
spend  his  time  in  sacrificing  and  praying  to  the  gods. 

4  Both  Pauli,  0.  c.  p.  135,  and  Green,  0.  c.  p.  102,  represent  the  English 
as  storming  the  Danish  position  But  I  do  not  see  how  this  is  to  be  inferred 
from  the  words  of  Asser :  'Cum  rex  in  oratione  diulius  moraietur  et 
Pa^ani  parati  ad  locum  certaminis  citius  advenissent,  sElfred  tunc  secund- 
arius  cum  diutius  hostiles  acies  ferre  non  posset,  nisi  aut  hello  retrorsum 
recederety  aut  contra  hostiles  copias  ante  f rain's  adzentum  in  belhim  prorum* 
parei\  ...  (p.  22). 


BATTLE  OF  ASHDOWN.  387 

own  responsibility  he  gave  the  signal  to  charge,  and  he  him- 
self, all  the  berserk  fury  upon  him,1  'like  a  wild  boar,'  rushed 
up  the  hill  at  the  head  of  his  men.  Happily  now  ^Ethelrtd 
had  done  his  mass,  and  his  division  too  moved  forward. 
There  was  a  certain  thorn-tree,  pointed  out  in  after-years  as 
the  place  where  the  greatest  shock  of  battle  was  felt.  At  last, 
thank  God,  the  enemy  were  seen  to  waver  and  break.  With 
tremendous  slaughter,  they  were  pushed  back,  and  finally 
driven  over  the  crest  and  across  the  hollows  of  the  downs,  the 
English  still  pursuing — -pursuing,  the  account  says,  for  a  day 
and  a  night.  One  wonders  that  any  of  the  Vikings  escaped 
from  such  a  carnage.  Never  before,  our  chronicler  assures  us, 
had  taken  place  such  a  slaughter  of  the  heathen — no,  not  at 
Ockley,  till  now  the  greatest  victory  which  the  English  had 
won.  The  little  purple  flower  which  the  English  in  after-years 
called  Danes' -blood  ought  to  have  grown  plentifully  hereafter 
on  these  downs.  Yet  some  of  the  Danes  did  escape,  and 
found  their  way  to  Reading.  They  were  still  strong  enough  to 
hold  their  camp. 

Here,  in  this  battle  of  Ashdown,  Alfred  won  his  spurs. 
His  had  been  the  greater  share  of  the  battle,  and  the  longest 
tale  of  slaughtered  foes.  One  of  the  two  kings,  indeed,  who 
were  opposed  to  ^thelred  had  fallen  ;  but  there  had  likewise 
fallen  all  the  five  earls  who  had  led  the  wing  opposite  to 
Alfred's.  Only  Halfdan  remained  to  guard  the  camp.  But 
for  the  memory  of  this  victory,  one  can  hardly  think  that  the 
English  would  have  nerved  themselves  to  the  long  struggle 
which  still  lay  before  them  ere  the  Danes  were  driven  out  01 
Wessex. 

For  the  resolution  of  the  Danes  was  unconquerable ;  they 

1  For  the  berserk  fury  was  no  monopoly  of  the  Northmen,  rather  an 
inheritance  of  all  the  Teutonic  race  ;  as  Cesar,  Plutarch,  or  Tacitus  can 
show  us. 


388  THE  GREA  T  ARMY. 

were  not  to  be  discouraged  by  one  defeat,  however  disastrous. 
They  must,  without  doubt,  have  received  reinforcements  by  the 
river  during  the  next  two  weeks.  At  the  end  of  that  short 
time  we  see  them  taking  the  offensive  once  more,  and  gaining 
a  victory  over  the  English  at  Basing,  in  Hampshire.  Two 
months  later,  another  battle  was  fought  at  Merton.  The  Eng- 
lish were  successful  at  the  outset ;  but  by  the  end  of  the  day 
the  Danes  had  regained  their  pjsition  and  held  the  field.  In 
the  English  army,  Bishop  Heahmund,  of  Sherbourne,  was 
slain. 

In  this  wise  passed  the  early  months  of  the  year  871,  the 
beginning  of  the  long  harvest  season  of  the  Danes.  Before 
the  year  grew  old  King  yEthelred  died,  and  on  the  shoulders 
of  the  ^Etheling  yElfred,  yet  only  twenty-two,  fell  the  burden 
of  defending  his  people  against  the  Danish  wolves,  who,  in 
ever-increasing  numbers,  poured  down  on  the  devoted  land. 
We  have  seen  ^Eifred  raging  like  a  wild  boar  011  the  field  of 
Ashdown.  Yet,  with  a  strength  and  a  martial  ardour  which 
made  him  a  true  son  of  the  royal  house  of  Wessex,  yElfred  was 
afflicted  by  a  strange  illness,  a  thorn  in  the  flesh,  such  as 
saints  and  heroes— St.  Pauls,  Alexanders,  Caesars,  Mahomets, 
Gustavus  Adolphuses — have  often  to  bear.  The  affliction  had 
come  upon  him  in  his  youth,  and  had  re-appeared  again  two 
years  ago,  on  the  occasion  of  his  marriage  with  a  Mercian  lady, 
Ealswyth,  daughter  of  ^Ethelred,  lord  of  the  Gaini.  We  do 
not  know  the  nature  of  the  illness ;  only  that  while  upon  him 
it  left  the  king  weak  as  a  child.  And  in  all  the  following 
years  of  trouble — now  meeting  the  invaders  hand  to  hand,  now 
hiding  from  them,  and,  in  the  secret  recesses  of  the  woods, 
preparing  to  strike  another  blow — let  not  in  our  picture  of  the 
heroic  young  king  the  recollection  of  ihis  added  affliction,  these 
moments  of  utter  physical  exhaustion,  worse  than  mere  pain, 


ALFRED.  389 

be  wanting.1  There  is  something  pathetic,  too,  in  the  thought 
of  ^Elfred  as  the  last  of  all  the  sons  of  yEthelwulf.  Of  the 
whole  family  of  brave  young  princes  who  had  once  gathered 
round  the  throne,  he  only  was  left,  this  youth  of  twenty-two  ; 
the  voices  which  in  earlier  days  might  have  given  or  taken 
counsel  with  him  all  silent. 

The  real  affliction  of  England,  that  which  seemed  to  make 
our  case  so  hopeless,  lay  in  the  continued  influx  of  fresh  hordes 
of  invaders  into  the  country.  It  seemed  as  if  there  were  no 
limit  to  the  supply  of  these  wolves  of  the  north.  A  generation 
had  passed  since  the  Vikings  had  begun  to  find  themselves 
secure  settlements  along  all  the  Frisian  and  Frankish  coasts. 
Young  men  had  grown  up  to  manhood,  inured  to  this  life  and 
to  no  other.  The  Vikings,  who  were  once  isolated  bands  of 
adventurers,  now  almost  formed  a  nation,  and  it  was  a  nation 
in  arms,  like  that  which,  in  '93  and  the  years  which  followed, 
swept  away  the  barriers  raised  by  the  princes  of  the  Continent, 
routed  the  most  skilful  of  Austrian  generals,  and  poured  into 
Switzerland  and  Italy.  Even  a  small  band  of  such  heroes  was 
terrible  to  the  peasant-soldiery  of  England. 

Some  time  was  needfully  spent  by  the  new  king  over  the 
obsequies  of  his  brother,  whose  tomb  was  raised  at  Wimborne. 
Meantime  a  new  '  summer-host '  (such  is  the  name  for  the 
usual  Viking  expedition,  which,  when  summer  began,  used  to 
set  out  vaguely  in  search  of  plunder)  had  reached  our  shores. 
It  ascended  the  Thames,  and  joined  its  crew  with  the  remains 
of  the  Great  Army  which  lay  at  Reading.  Vain  had  been  the 
slaughter  of  Ashdown.  The  army  was  now  strong  enough  to 
march  deep  into  the  West  Saxon  territory,  and  harry  on  all 
sides  almost  unopposed.  This  was  the  sight  which  confronted 
Alfred  when,  a  month  after  the  death  of  ^Ethelred,  he  again 

1  We  are  not,  it  is  true,  obliged  to  accept  Asser's  account  of  this.  Cf. 
Pauli,  /.  c. ,  p.  121,  note. 


390  THE  GREAT  ARMY. 

took  the  field.  He  had  now  to  abandon  the  eastern  parts  of 
Wessex  to  their  own  devices  for  offence  ;  for  the  Danish  army 
had  advanced  far  westward,  and  it  was  at  Wilton,  that  little 
forlorn  town  upon  the  Willy,  then  the  capital  of  the  Wilsaetas, 
that  they  next  encountered  the  English.  Once  more  an  old 
manoeuvre  won  the  day.  The  English  had  been  pushing  their 
opponents  back;  suddenly  the  Viking  army  turned  and  fled; 
the  English,  alas  !  pursued  in  hot  haste,  only  to  see  their 
adversaries  rallying  again  at  a  given  point,  themselves  to  be 
taken  in  disorder  and  defeated.  For  the  moment  this  was  a 
decisive  victory.  Alfred  was  as  powerless  against  the  invaders 
as  Charles  the  Bald  had  become  after  the  Oissel  disaster.  He 
had  no  resource  but  that  which  was  such  a  common  one  in 
France,  a  heavy  bribe. 

At  all  events,  Alfred  and  his  English  could  reflect  that  they 
had  not  yielded  easily  to  this  expedient,  nor  at  once.  Nowhere 
abroad  had  men  to  bear  such  heavy  and  continued  attacks  as 
had  fallen  upon  England  of  late,  and  on  Wessex  last  of  all. 
In  the  course  of  the  last  year,  ^Ethelred  and  Alfred  and  their 
subjects  had  fought  eight  pitched  battles  and  countless  skir- 
mishes with  this  implacable  enemy ;  they  had  almost  anni- 
hilated one  army,  and  had  killed  a  lar^e  number  of  the  Danish 
leaders — one  king,  if  not  more,  and  nine  earls.1  But  fresh 
troops  and  fresh  leaders  always  came  in  to  supply  the  places  of 
the  old.  Nevertheless,  the  Danes  themselves  may  have  been 
glad  to  call  a  truce  and  receive  their  danegeld,  and  to  turn 
against  less  stubborn  bands  of  English  militia. 

They   crossed   the   Thames,  and  marched   upon    London, 
which  had  long  been  included  in  the  kingdom  of 

A  D    7C2  • 

Mercia.     It  seems  they  took  the  city ;  for  a  coin  of 
their  leader,  Halfdan,  probably  struck  in  this  year,  was  struck 

1  Asser  (Wise)  p.  25. 


.     BURG  RED  DETHRONED.  391 

in  London.  It  bears  in  a  monogram  the  word  '  Londonia.' ' 
The  Mercian  king  could  do  nothing.  He  paid  his  danegeld 
as    Alfred   had  done,   and  the  fleet  sailed  north 

A.D.  873 

into  Northumbria.      Thence  they  went  into  Lin- 
colnshire, and,   in  the  neighbourhood  of  Torksey,  spent  the 
winter  of  873-4. 

Next  year  they  were  up  again.  Nothing  availed  the  Mer 
cians  their  treaty  of  the  previous  year  and  the  fine 
they  had  paid.  The  Vikings  marched  from  Tork- 
sey to  Repton,  one  of  the  chief  royal  seats  of  Mercia,  and  the 
burial-place  of  her  kings.  The  ancient  abbey,  where  rested  so 
many  royal  bones,  was*  burnt  by  the  invaders.  Mercia  lay  at 
their  disposal  as  fully  as  Northumbria  had  lain  seven  years 
ago  ;  and,  as  they  had  done  in  Northumbria,  the  Danes  now 
deposed  the  English  king,  Burgred,  and  raised  up  a  puppet  of 
their  own.  Ceolwulf,  '  an  unwise  king's  thane,'  was  placed 
upon  the  Mercian  throne,  and  he  took  an  oath  to  hold  it  at  the 
pleasure  of  the  conquerors.  We  may  guess  with  what  feelings 
yElfred  saw  his  brother-in-law  thus  dethroned  and  driven  out 
of  the  land,  and  the  second  English  kingdom  falling  wholly 
into  Danish  hands.  Burgred  set  sail  for  Rome,  and  never  saw 
his  native  shores  again.  After  the  driving  forth  of  Burgred, 
the  Viking  army  began  to  take  all  the  measures  befitting  con- 
querors of  a  new  country.  It  separated  into  two  portions; 
one  division  marched  under  Halfdan  back  into  Northumbria. 
There,  says  the  Chronicle,  Halfdan  divided  the  land — divided, 
that  is,  partitioned  it,  between  his  own  followers  and  the  native 
English.2  The  latter  were  not  entirely  dispossessed ;  but  their 
possessions  shrank  within  narrower  limits,  and  they  descended 
to  a  social  level  below  their  conquerors.  Where  they  had  been 
full  allodial  owners,  they  became  more  like  tenants  by  base 

1  Kenyon,  Silver  Coins  of  England,  p.  79. 
■  So,  at  least  Steenstrup,  0.  c.  i.  297. 


392  THE  GREAT  ARMY. 

tenure.  And  very  soon  a  like  fate  befell  Mercia.  The  Danes 
spread  themselves  over  the  land,  and  after  a  year  or  two's 
nominal  reign,  Ceolvvulf  was  deprived  of  most  of  his  territory. 
'  The  Danes  divided  the  land,  and  gave  part  to  Ceolvvulf.' J 
'  Such  was  the  end,'  says  Pauli,  'of  a  kingdom  which  for  a  long 
period  had  disputed  the  supremacy  with  the  West  Saxons.  Its 
precipitate  fall,  as  well  as  the  death  of  the  last  ruler,  must  have 
produced  a  deep  impression  upon  Aiifred.  He  saw  the  old 
plans  and  aspirations  of  his  race  vitally  endangered,  and  his 
sister  doomed  to  a  life  of  sorrow,  after  having  been  deprived  of 
her  husband  and  her  crown.' 


V. 

Here  perhaps  would  be  the  place  (had  one  time)  to  speak 
of  the  admixture  of  Danish  and  English  blood  brought  about 
by  the  settlement  of  the  Danes  in  Northumbria,  in  East 
Anglia,  and  in  Mercia.  Worsaae  has  devoted  himself,  in  the 
pages  of  a  short  work,  to  the  task  of  following  up  the  traces 
left  by  the  Danes  and  Norsemen  throughout  the  British  Isles.2 
These  traces  are  of  many  kinds  :  in  the  nomenclature  of  places, 
in  new  customs  and  laws  introduced  from  the  North,  in  new 
blood  affecting  the  actual  physique  of  the  inhabitants  of  these 
islands.  We  must,  however,  remember  that  we  have  as  yet 
arrived  only  at  the  beginning  of  the  connection  between  the 
Scandinavian  countries  and  England  ;  that  the  Danish  con- 
quest of  England  in  the  eleventh  century  has  yet  to  come,  and 
that  it  would  be  impossible,  without  lengthy  and  tedious  dis- 

1  Green  makes  the  reasonable  suggestion  that  here  we  have  the  origin  of 
the  two  Mercias— the  English  and  the  Danish— established  a  few  years 
later  by  the  Treaty  of  Wedmore. 

a  Minder  om  de  Danske  og  Nordmandene  i  England,  &°c.  (Copenhagen, 
1851).  Trs.  An  Account  of  the  Danes  a  id  Norivegians  in  England,  <5rV. 
(London,  1852). 


NORSE  AND  DANISH  BLOOD  IN  ENGLAND.     393 

cussion,  to  decide  which,  among  the  more  salient  changes 
introduced  here  by  the  Northmen,  are  to  be  reckoned  the 
work  of  the  Vikings  of  our  era,  or  of  the  Danes  of  a  later 
date. 

But  how  much  the  history  of  this  present  century  paved 
the  way  for  the  subsequent  history  of  the  Danes  in  England 
may  be  judged  from  this,  one  fact.  It  seems  probable  that 
when,  a  few  years  aft>r  the  deposition  of  Burgred,  the  Danes 
(as  the  Chronicle  tells  us)  divided  Mercia  and  gave  part 
to  Ceolwulf,  the  division  here  made  was  the  same  which 
afterwards  obtained  after  the  peace  of  Wed  more;  that  is  to 
say,  that  the  portion  of  Mercia  east  of  the  Lea  and  Watling 
Street  fell  to  the  Danes,  whereas  the  portion  west  of  this 
dividing  line  remained  subject  to  an  English  king.1  But  this 
was  likewise  the  partition  made  between  Cnut  and  Edmund 
Ironside,  a  century  and  a  half  later.  From  which  we  argue 
that  the  Danish  England,  which  was  now  created  by  the 
Vikings,  remained  the  Danish  England  which  welcomed  with 
enthusiasm  the  invasions  of  Sweyn  and  Cnut. 

So  far  as  concerns  the  districts  where  settlements  of  Norse- 
men and  Danes  have  been  most  frequent  in  England,  or,  let 
us  say,  throughout  the  British  Isles,  these,  it  would  seem, 
cannot  be  better  determined  than  by  an  examination  of  place- 
names  in  Great  Britain  and  Ireland. 

Certain  local  names,  more  especially  certain  terminations  of 
names  which  are  common  in  this  country,  can  easily  be  shown 
to  owe  their  origin  to  the  Northmen.  Such,  for  example,  are 
the  terminations  (or  not  necessarily  terminations) — by  (O.D. 
byr)  thorp  (J>orf) — thwaite  (fiveit) — toft  {toft) — beck  (bcsk) 
— ness  (tubs) — ey2 — dale  (ddl) — force  ifoss) — fell  (fjceld) — 
tarn  (teem) — hough  or  how  (/mug) — garth  (gaard) — wick  (vik) 

1  Green,  Conquest  of  England,  p.  121,  and  Worsaae,  0,  c. 
3  Doubtful ;  but  so,  Worsaae. 


394  THE  GREA  T  ARMY. 

— ford.1  Some  of  these  terminations  are  peculiarly  Norse,  as 
thwaite,  force,  fell ;  others  are  more  characteristic  of  the  Danes 
as  toft,  thorp,  and  by. 

The  northern  place-names  and  terminations  again  divide 
themselves  into  two  groups.  Some  of  them,  such  as  ey,  ness, 
wick,  ford,  how,  5rar(acliff),  and  certain  other  words  which,  like 
these,  speak  of  those  natural  features  of  a  country  which  may 
be  best  discerned  from  the  sea,  tell  more  of  the  days  of  Viking 
piracy  than  of  settlement  and  colonization.  Other  words 
oelong  to  a  settled  life ;  such  words  are  by,  garth,  thorp, 
thwaite,  and  in  a  less  degree  force,  fell.  In  certain  parts  of 
Great  Britain  (e.g.,  the  North-West  of  Eng'and)  the  Viking  names 
are  more  distinctly  Danish,  the  settlement-names  more  Norse. 
It  is  not  necessary  to  give  instances  of  the  occurrence  of  the 
various  terminations  I  have  mentioned  in  English  place-names; 
half-a-dozen  instances  for  every  one  will  spring  at  once  into  the 
mind  of  the  reader.  And  he  will  himself  be  able,  if  he  choose, 
to  trace  in  a  map  of  the  British  Isles  the  localities  where 
these  various  kinds  of  termination  preponderate.  If  he  wishes 
to  arrive  more  easily  at  the  main  results  of  the  inquiry  he  can 
turn  to  the  work  of  Worsaae  already  cited,  to  Joyce's  Irish 
Place  Names,  and  to  Canon  Taylor's  Words  and  Places.2 

Worsaae  gives  in  a  table  the  results  of  an  inquiry  into  the 

1  When  used  in  the  sense  of  a  passage  up  a  river-mouth  or  estuary  ford 
is  Danish  ;  when  it  means  only  a  passage  across  a  river  or  brook  it  is  AS. 
Fords  of  the  former  kind  are  Carlingford,  Strangford,  Wexford,  and  Water- 
ford  in  Ireland. 

2  I  grant  that  there  is  no  reason  why  many  of  these  Norse  and  Danish 
terminations  should  not  have  been  bestowed  in  the  course  of  succeeding 
centuries  ;  seeing  that  such  words  as  thwaite,  toft,  &c,  had  become  in- 
corporated in  the  speech  of  the  English  in  North  England.  Such  incorpora- 
tion is  itself  evidence  of  a  strong  Danish  or  Norse  infusion  in  the  popula- 
tion ;  but  that  is  not  quite  the  same  thing  as  the  inference  which  Worsaae 
and  Taylor  draw  from  the  terminations  of  place-names.  Canon  Taylor's 
work,  too,  must  be  ustd  with  caution,  as  the  author  has  made  several 
mistakes,  e.g.,  the  noted  instance  of  Saltaire. 


NORSE  AND  DANISH  BLOOD  IN  ENGLAND.    395 

prace-names  having  the  first  thirteen  terminations  cited  above. 
The  total  number  of  places  included  in  his  table  is  1373. 
Out  of  these  the  terminations  in  ^constitute  nearly  half — 604; 
wherefore  this  place-ending,  as  our  own  knowledge  would 
naturally  suggest  to  us,  is  by  far  the  most  important  of  all ;  it 
is  eminently  typical  of  the  days  of  Danish  settlement  in  Eng- 
land. When,  therefore,  we  find  that  out  of  the  604  by  5  in 
Worsaae's  list,  no  less  than  379  come  from  Yorkshire  and 
Lincolnshire,  while  these  counties  likewise  contain  697  names 
out  of  Worsaae's  total — 1373  ;  it  is  evident  that  Yorkshire  and 
Lincolnshire  may  claim  to  possess  by  far  the  greatest  infusion 
of  Danish  blood.  It  is,  in  fact,  in  the  North  and  East  Ridings 
of  Yorkshire  and  in  Lincolnshire,  and  next  after  these  counties 
in  Leicestershire,  Rutland,  Nottingham,  and  East  Anglia,  that 
we  must  look  for  the  chief  remains  of  Danish  colonization  in 
England.  In  the  West  Riding  of  Yorkshire,  in  Cumberland 
and  Westmoreland,  we  find  the  traces  of  a  Norse  settlement 
which  belongs  probably  to  the  century  following  the  one  with 
which  we  are  dealing.  Most  likely  it  migrated  thither  from 
Ireland,  at  the  time  when  the  Norse  kings  in  Ireland  became 
likewise  kings  in  Northumbria.  Thus,  of  names  with  the 
termination  dale  which  is  characteristically  Norse  (so  familiar 
to  us  in  the  name  dalesman),  we  find  in  Worsaae's  list  out  of  a 
total  of  142,  52  names  from  Cumberland  and  Westmoreland, 
and  40  from  the  West  Riding  of  Yorkshire;  and  out  of  95 
examples  of  the  still  more  characteristic  fell,1  57  are  from 
Cumberland  and  Westmoreland,  and  21  from  the  West  Riding 
— 78,  that  is,  out  of  95. 

In  Scotland  the  Scandinavian  names  come  wholly  from  the 
Norsemen,  not  from  the  Danes.  The  names  in  the  Shetlands, 
Orkneys,  and  Caithness  are  almost  exclusively  Norse ;  as  are 

1  Worsaae  has  only  fifteen  examples  of  force  {e.g.,  Airey  force,  &c). 
But,  such  as  these  are,  they  belong  exclusively  to  the  N.-W.  of  England. 


396  THE  GREA T  ARMY. 

the  names  in  the  lesser  islands  of  the  Hebrides  (the  Sudreyar) 
and  over  half  the  larger  island,  Lewis.  There  are  traces  of 
Norse  settlement  all  round  the  coast  of  Scotland,  and  far  into 
the  interior  of  Sutherland  and  Ross.  In  Wales  the  names 
which  betray  a  Scandinavian  origin  are  comparatively  few  :  as 
we  might  expect  from  the  history  of  the  principality.  The 
Great  Orme  in  North  Wales  is  one  conspicuous  instance  ;  a 
few  names  in  South  Wales,  especially  in  Pembrokeshire — Mil- 
ford,  Haverford,  Tenby,  for  example — almost  make  up  the 
list.  Of  the  Norse  names  in  Ireland  something  has  been 
already  said.1 

But  now  we  must  hurry  on  to  watch  the  conclusion  of  the 
great  drama  which  was  to  be  fought  out  in  Wessex.  Remember 
now  or  never  was  the  time  for  the  Danes  to  possess  themselves 
of  the  whole  of  England,  to  turn  it  into  a  Scandinavian  state. 
Who  knows  what  their  future  achievements  might  have  been  if 
they  had  raised  up  a  great  Viking  kingdom  here  so  close  to  the 
shores  of  France  ?  All  Europe  wTas  concerned  in  the  issue  of 
the  struggle  of  the  next  few  years ;  and  if  that  issue  hung  upon 
the  constancy  of  a  single  man,  then  it  depended  upon  the 
King  Alfred.  If  he  must  have  been  deeply  and  gloomily 
impressed  with  what  was  going  on  north  of  the  Thames,  what, 
we  may  think,  were  the  feelings  of  his  subjects,  who  had 
already  borne  so  many  trials,  achieved  such  deeds,  all,  as  it 
seemed,  in  vain  ?. 

Now  the  Danes  were  divided  into  two  armies,  whose  fields 
of  labour  henceforward  lay  nearly  always  apart.  The  Nor- 
thumbrian Danes,  under  Halfdan,  sought  a  fresh  theatre  of 
ravage.  They  crossed  over  to  the  western  side  of  England 
and  plundered  in  Strathclyde  Britain,  from  the  Mersey  to  the 
Clyde,  and  northward  in  the  country  of  the  Picts.     The  reign 

*  Compare  the  map  in  Canon  Taylor's  Words  and  Places. 


THE  ARMY  RETURNS  TO   WESSEX.  397 

of  the  native  princes  of  North  Northumbria  (Bernicia)  seems 
to  have  still  continued.  But  their  power  must  have  been  little 
more  than  nominal.1  Almost  all  the  religious  houses  of 
Northumbria  were  destroyed.  But  the  Christian  bishops  still 
sat  at  York. 

In  the  year  875  the  southern  portion  of  the 
Danish  army — the  northern  division  was  with  Half- 
dan  in  Strathclyde  and  Pictland — settled  itself  at  Cambridge, 
under  the  command  of  Guthorm,Oskytel,and  Amund  (Anwynd). 
Alfred,  meanwhile,  had  not  been  idle.  He  had  profited  by  the 
teaching  of  his  enemies,  for  he  had  used  the  brief  interval  of 
rest  to  build  a  fleet  to  meet  the  foe  upon  their  chosen  element. 
He  had,  we  may  believe,  employed  his  fleet  with  some  success 
in  guarding  the  southern  coasts  ;  we  are,  at  all  events,  told  of 
one  occasion  when  he  encountered  a  small  squadron  of  six 
Viking  ships 2  of  which  he  captured  one  and  put  the  rest  to 
flight.  But  these  small  achievements  were  of  little  account 
against  the  fresh  storm  which  was  about  to  burst  on  Wessex. 

In  a.d.  876  the  Cambridge  army  secretly  took 
ship  in  the  marsh  country,  sailed  out  to  sea,  and 
came  at  length  to  Wareham  in  Dorset.  3  It  was  a  place  strongly 
defended  by  nature,  only  to  be  attacked  by  land  from  the 
west,  and  the  fleet  held  the  sea — Alfred's  navy  did  not  as  yet 
feel  strong  enough  to  cope  with  it — so  the  supplies  of  the 
garrison  were  ensured.  Henceforward,  owing  perhaps  to 
^Elfred's  ship-building,  the  Danes  moved  their  army  and  their 

1  They  struck  no  coins.  {Cat.  Eng.  Coins  in  British  Museum,  p.  1S8.) 
Nevertheless,  the  settlement  of  Danes  in  Bernicia  must  have  been  more 
limited  than  in  Deira.     See  preceding  page. 

2  Six,  Asser  ;  seven,  AS.  Chron.  (A.-E.). 

3  The  account  of  this  in  both  Asser  and  the  Chronicle  is  rather  absurd  : 
Her  hiene  bestcel  se  here  into  H'erham  ('stole  into  Wareham' — from 
Cambridge  !)  Paganorum  exercitus  noctu  de  Grantebrycge  exiens,  cast  Hum 
quod  duitur  IVerham  intravit. 


393  THE  GREAT  ARMY. 

fleet  more  in  conjunction  than  they  had  done  during  the 
earlier  years  of  invasion  ;  and  in  making  this  change  of  tactic 
we  cannot  doubt  that  they  greatly  strengthened  their  position 
and  paved  the  way  for  the  successes  which  they  now  achieved. 

Alfred  marched  against  the  Wareham  Danes.  But  when 
the  armies  came  in  sight  they  did  not  engage  ;  neither  side 
seemed  willing  to  risk  a  battle.  The  Danes  thought  probably 
that  they  could  gain  as  much  by  stratagem.  They  made  peace, 
and  swore  on  holy  ring  and  Christian  relic  to  leave  the  king- 
dom.1 But  when  Alfred  retired  half  of  them  stole  away  to 
Exeter  and  settled  there.  Exeter  might  be  reckoned  as  still 
part  of  West  Wales ;  though  it  had  really  been  incorporated  in 
Wessex  long  before  now  ;  and  by  a  strained  interpretation  the 
Vikings  might  plead  that  they  had  still  observed  the  terms  of 
their  oath.2  In  this  event  is  illustrated  the  knowledge  which  the 
Vikings  had  acquired  of  England,  and  of  the  weak  points  in 
the  English  system  of  defence.  They  were  always  ready,  slept, 
we  may  say,  upon  their  arms ;  but  the  English  fyrd  was  called 
together  for  a  definite  purpose  and  for  a  limited  time.  The 
husbandman  left  his  corn  uncut,  his  fields  untilled,  to  join  the 
dragon  banner  of  Wessex  :  his  thoughts  were  with  his  home  and, 
when  the  period  of  service  had  come  to  an  end,  nothing  could 
keep  him  with  his  colours.  Then  was  the  chance  for  the  Danes. 
It  was  mere  folly  for  them  to  engage  the  English  when  fully 
prepared  for  battle ;  while  a  little  ruse,  a  little  delay,  would 
throw  the  country  at  their  mercy. 

Alfred  now  brought  his  fleet  to  blockade  the  Vikings  in 
Exeter.  But  continued  reinforcements  came  pouring  in. 
Halfdan  and  Ivar  '  after  many  slaughterings '  (in  their  Strath- 

1  They  swore  their  solemn  oath  upon  the  holy  baug  — a  ring  placed  up<  a 
a  sort  of  altar  {cf.  C.  P.  B.  i.  403,  quotation  from  Islendinga-bok).  They  all  < 
took  such  oaths  upon  Christian  relics  as  were  desired  (Asser). 

a  Green,  0.  c.  p.  108. 


ATTACK  UPON  WALES.  399 

clyde  and  Pictish  war?)  sailed  round  to  Devon — so  at  least 
Asser  says  ;  but  it  seems  likely  there  is  some  mistake  here. 
Whether  or  no  a  large  Viking  fleet  was  coming  from  Wareham 
to  raise  the  blockade  of  Exeter.  But  on  their  way  '  a  great  fog 
meets  them  on  the  sea,'  and  the  fog  is  followed  by  a  storm,  the 
storm  is  followed  by  an  attack  from  Alfred's  fleet,  and  there 
in  Swanage  Bay  the  whole  Danish  armament  of  one  hundred 
and  twenty  sail  was  destroyed. 

Wherefore,  after  the  siege  of  Exeter  had  lasted  all  the 
summer,  the  Danes  had  at  length  to  submit.  Humbly  they 
took  their  departure,  some  for  South  Wales,  some  for 
Gloucestershire.  Under  Ubbe  the  Northmen  made  a  furious 
attack  upon  Wales  in  the  ensuing  year.  They  were  defeated 
at  first  in  two  battles,  but  in  the  end  Rodrick  Mawr  the  Prince 
of  Wales  had  to  abandon  his  country  and  flee  to  Ireland. 

One  famous  victory  crowned  the  arms  of  the  English,  under 
Ealdorman  Odda,  the  following  year,  at  '  Cynwith' 
— in  Devonshire,  we  may  suppose.  Therein,  the 
English  took  the  banner  of  the  Vikings,  the  raven  banner 
which  had  been  (so  at  least  it  was  said  x)  woven  by  Lodbrok's 
daughters  for  Ivar  and  Ubbe,  woven  no  doubt  with  mystic 
chants,  like  those  which  accompanied  the  making  of  the 
banner  borne  at  Clontarf — 

Wide  is  wrought  the  web  of  slaughter, 

The  drooping  spear-cloud 2  that  raineth  blood. 

But  even  while  this  victory  was  being  gained  the  English 
resistance  was  breaking  down,  hopelessly,  finally  as  it 
seemed.  Next  year,  as  the  Yule-tide  feasts  were  beginning, 
news  was  brought  that  the  Danish  army,  which  had  departed 

1  Only  in  the  Annals  of  Asser  and  the  worst  MSS.  of  the  '  Life.' 
8  The  banner  supported,  as  was  the  fashion,  upon  two  spears  is  likened 
to  a  cloud  overhanging  the  army  and  raining  down  blood. 


4oo  THE  GREA  T  A  KM  Y. 

from  Exeter  and  made  its  way  into  Gloucestershire,  had  re 
turned  thence  into  the  country  of  the  Wilsaetas,  navigated  the 
Avon  (the  Bath  Avon)  we  may  suppose,  and  made  itself  a 
strong  camp  at  Chippenham.  And  somehow,  now  the  whole 
opposition  to  their  movements  seems  to  have  collapsed.  Alfred 
was  not  wanting  to  himself,  but  his  subjects,  wearied  out  with 
their  long  vigil,  their  marchings  and  countermarchii  gs,  seemed 
to  have  given  up  hope,  to  have  begun  to  think  of  submitting  to 
the  inevitable,  as  the  Northumbrians  and  East  Anglians  and 
Mercians  had  submitted.  They  even  began  to  quarrel  among 
themselves,  as  the  Irish  so  often  did  in  the  very  face  of  the 
Northern  invasions.1  The  Danes  set  to  work  to  harry  the 
country  round  Chippenham  ;  Alfred  raised  no  army  to  oppose 
them,  and  they  carried  on  their  work  unhindered. 

Then  came  that  darkest  moment  in  the  English  annals  and 
in  the  life  of  the  king.  All  lost  heart,  except  jElfred  the  king, 
him  and  a  few  chosen  followers.  Of  their  forlorn  wanderings 
about  the  dark  marshy  regions  of  Devonshire  and  Somerset, 
and  their  adventures  therein,  history  and  mythology  love  to 
tell.  After  a  while  /Elfred  settled  down  with  a  small  band  of 
followers  upon  a  little  island  made  at  the  function  of  the  Tone 
and  the  Parret,  two  Somersetshire  rivers.  There  he  made  him- 
self a  fort,  like  the  forts  which  the  Danes  themselves  had  been 
wont  to  raise  in  the  enemy's  country.  Such  it  was  to  him. 
How  strangely  the  tables  have  been  turned,  when  the  Vikings 
appear  as  the  masters  of  the  country,  and  the  rightful  king  of 
VVessex  skulks  like  an  outlaw,  -hidden  amid  the  woods  and 
morasses,  making  his  sallies  upon  the  enemy  when  opportunity 
shows  itself!  That  island  where  the  fires  of  patriotism,  which 
had  burnt  so  low  everywhere  else  were  still  kept  alive,  is  a 
sacred  place  for  all  Englishmen,  worthy  of  a  pilgrimage,  not  less 

1  ^Ethelwerd  a.  a.  886,  see  Lappenberg,  Hist  of  Eng.  (trs.)  ii.  53. 


GUTHORAVS  CAMP  AT  CHIPPENHAM.         401 

holy  than  those  rocks  which  sheltered  the  last  heirs  of  the 
Gothic  race,  when  the  Arabs  became  masters  of  Spain;  than 
the  lake  beside  which  the  bravest  of  the  Swiss  met.  to  plot  the 
deliverance  of  their  country.  It  gained  its  name  from  its  use 
now,  and  became  the  ^Ethelney,  or  Princes'  Island — now  an 
island  no  more.  There  was  found  in  1693  the  jewel  inscribed 
with  '  ^Elfred  ordered  me  to  be  made,'  which  Oxford  now 
guards. 

The  loss  of  the  single  battle  at  Cynwith,  or  even  of  a  magic 
woven  banner  could  do  nothing  to  damp  the  spirit 

A.D.  878 

of  the  Danes  in  Guthorm's  camp.  And  high  revel, 
we  need  not  doubt,  was  held  at  Chippenham  all  this  springtime 
of  878,  where  the  country  seemed  so  utterly  subdued,  while  the 
leaves  were  budding  in  Selwood  Forest.  But  when  the  leafy 
screen  was  thick,  Alfred  had  stolen  from  his  island,  had  called 
together  the  men  of  Somersetshire,  and  Wiltshire,  and  Hamp- 
shire. Of  a  sudden  a  new  army  has  burst  from  the  dense  forest 
shades  and  is  marching  straight  upon  the  Danes.  One  day's 
march  to  Iglea  (Hey  or  Highley  ?)  the  next — 

'  E  lendemain  a  hure  de  none, 
Done  sunt  venuz  a  Edenesdone '  (^Ethandune),1 

as  sang  a  Norman  poet  some  three  centuries  afterwards.2 

The  Danish  army  came  out  to  meet  them.  The  serried 
ranks  of  the  English  were  arranged  in  a  wedge  shape — that 
formation  which  of  old  days  the  Macedonian  phalanx  had 
loved,  that  fylking  homal,  if  so  we  may  call  it,  which  the 
Goths  and  the  ancestors  of  the  Vikings  had  often  used.  We 
can  guess,  as  the  English  army  came  over  the  high  down 
and  looked  over  the  rich  plain  towards  Chippenham,  what 
memories  of  burning  homesteads,  and  violated  wives,  of  sons 

1  Eddmgton  or  Heddington.     Earle  (Sax.  Chron.,  note  s.a.)  decides  foj 
Highley  Common  and  Heddington.  2  Gaimar,  v.  3189-90. 

27 


402  THE  GREA  T  A  Iffl  V. 

and    daughters  enslaved  and  carried    over  sea,1  nerved  their 
arms  for  the  coming  battle. 

It  did  not  last  long.  Soon  the  Danes  were  flying  for  shelter 
to  their  camp  at  Chippenham,  and  once  more  Wessex  was  re- 
covered to  the  English  king. 

Alfred  sat  down  to  besiege  the  Danes  in  their  camp.  But 
anon,  negotiations  were  opened  which,  as  it  proved,  paved  the 
way  to  a  durable  peace.  However  great  may  have  been  the  desire 
of  the  English  for  vengeance,  a  little  thought  must  have  shown 
them  that  they  had  no  chance  of  driving  the  Danes  altogether 
out  of  the  country.  Even  if  they  destroyed  one  army  a  fresh 
one  would  come  next  year  to  take  its  place,  and  the  esprit  de 
corps  which  existed  among  the  Vikings  — at  any  rate,  those  in 
England — would  have  made  the  new  army  the  avenger  of  the 
old.  Instead  of  this  perpetual  vendetta,  an  occasion  offered 
for  concluding  something  like  a  permanent  peace  between  the 
English  and  the  Danes.  Each  had  tried  the  metal  of  the 
other ;  each  seemed  alike  unconquerable.  A  few  days  since 
/Elfred  had  been  ail-but  hunted  out  of  the  last  corner  of  his 
realm ;  now  by  the  peace  which  was  presently  concluded 
between  him  and  Guthorm,  not  only  was  all  Wessex  restored 
to  him,  but  even  a  considerable  part  of  the  Mercian  kingdom, 
which  seemed  to  have  passed  for  ever  into  the  hands  of  the 
Vikings.  The  peace  was  concluded  at  Wedmore,  and  by  that 
name  it  is  known  in  our  history  books.  But  there  is  no  other 
name  for  it  than  that  which  we  find  in  the  collections  of  Anglo- 
Saxon  laws  and  institutions,  ALlfreds  and  Gothorms  Fri<5 
Alfred  and  Guthorm's  Peace.  In  every  way  its  provisions 
were  honourable  to  the  English.  By  it  Guthorm  himself  con- 
sented to  receive  baptism  and  to  rule  as  a  Christian  king  in 

1  Cf.  Chron.  a.a. 


PEACE  OF  WED  MO  RE.  403 

East  Anglia  where  the  blood  of  Eadmund  had  cemented  the 
devotion  of  the  East  Anglians  to  their  creed.  The  baptismal 
name  of  Guthorm  was  /Ethelstan.  ^Elfred  acted  as  his  sponsor. 
In  the  division  of  territory  between  the  two  kings,  the  Dane 
took  the  land  east  of  a  line  which  ran  along  the  northern  bank 
of  the  Thames,  turning  away  up  the  Lea  before  it  reached 
London,  then  up  to  the  source  of  the  latter  river,  then  straight 
up  to  Bedford,  then  up  the  Ouse  till  you  reach  Watling  Street, 
and  by  that  line  up  to  Chester.1  But  here  the  kingdom  of 
Guthorm  came  in  contact  with  that  which  Halfdan  had 
already  established  in  Northumbria. 

There  were  thus  three  kingdoms  in  England  after  Wedmore 
— two  Danish  and  one  English.  Yet  when  we  review  the 
position  of  y£lfred  just  before  the  battle  of  ./Ethandune  or  the 
history  of  England  for  the  twelve  years  which  had  followed  the 
advent  of  the  Great  Army,  the  wonder  is  that  ^Elfred  should 
have  gained  so  much,  not  so  little,  as  the  result  of  a  single 
battle. 

For  the  position  of  the  English  was  very  different  from  that 
of  their  neighbours  abroad.  There,  while  a  certain  traditional 
reverence  surrounded  the  Frankish  and  Imperial  names,  and  the 
Empire  by  its  very  vastness  and  variety  precluded  the  idea  of 
complete  conquest,  here,  in  our  compact  island  and  on  an 
homogeneous  population,  the  scheme  of  conquest  had  been 
fairly  tried.  That  it  had  not  proved  altogether  successful  was 
due  to  the  obstinacy  of  the  West  Saxons,  and  more  than  all  to 
the  indomitable  spirit  of  their  king.  But  when  once  the  best 
efforts  had  been  put  forth  on  either  side,  both  parties  to  the 
combat  recognized  the  merits  of  a  compromise.     Dane  and 

1  .^Erest  ymbe  heora  land  gema;rca  andlang  Temese  Jraet  [)>anon]  up  in 
Ligean  and  lang  Ligean  6ft  hire  ae-wylm  (source)  J)anon  on  gerihta 
(straight  on)  to  Bedanforda  jianon  up  on  Usan  63  Wsetlinga  straet.  — 
ALlfreds  and  Guthorms  Fricf,  not  a  contemporary  source ;  but  we  have 
none  better. 


404  THE  GREAT  ARMY. 

English  were  everywhere  admitted  to  an  equal  footing — the 
weregeld  of  a  Dane  was  the  same  as  that  of  an  Englishman. 
The  land  was  partitioned  between  them.  If  there  were  two 
Danish  kingdoms  and  one  English,  we  must  remember  that  one 
of  the  Danes  had  become  a  Christian.  Halfdan  remained  a 
heathen,  and  his  memory  was  execrated  accordingly.  But  his 
successor,  a  certain  obscure.  Gufrred,  was  most  certainly  a 
Christian.  So  that  though  the  English  people  had  suffered 
grievously  and  saw  everywhere  their  lands  divided  with  Danish 
colonizers,  they  had  not  suffered  without  compensations ;  they 
were  not  a  conquered  nation,  mere  dirt  beneath  the  feet  of  the 
victorious  Vikings,  as,  wherever  the  Danes  did  plant  themselves 
on  the  Continent,  became  the  conquered  Gauls  or  Frisians. 
Nor,  again,  was  the  realm  of  Christendom  diminished  save  for  a 
time;  for  the  newly-settled  Danes  soon  gave  up  their  Odin  wor- 
ship. Before  long  the  two  people,  so  much  alike  in  parentage 
and  character,  began  to  amalgamate,  and  out  of  that  admixture 
came  the  race  which  it  would  be  no  extravagance  to  claim  as 
the  very  cream  of  the  English  people — I  mean  the  people  of 
the  north  of  England,  of  Yorkshire,  and  of  Lincolnshire. 

On  this  scene  of  the  peace  of  Wedmore  we  may  let  the 
curtain  fall,  as  it  is  a  proper  climax  of  the  drama  of  Viking 
conquest  in  England.  There  were,  of  course,  recurring  waves 
of  invasion,  but  they  were  no  more  than  the  final  efforts  of  a 
storm  that  was  spent.  We  can  leave  them  aside.  For  the 
history  of  the  Vikings  on  the  Continent,  the  history  of  the 
Western  Empire  generally — silent  for  the  last  ten  years — calls 
once  more  for  our  attention.  To  that  ground  the  brunt  of  the 
struggle  between  the  Northmen  and  the  Christians  was  again 
transferred. 


CHAPTER  XIII. 
PAUSE  IN   THE    VIKING   RAIDS. 


In  Continental  Europe,  during  the  same  period,  no  heroic 
struggle  for  life  and  death  was  going  on  between  Christian  and 
heathen  ;  but  a  slow  decay  of  all  the  forces  of  the  Common- 
wealth which  had  been  continually  urged  forward  by  the 
harassing  attacks  of  the  Northmen  displayed  its  effects  on 
every  side. 

Nevertheless  we  may  allow  that  the  means  which  Charles 
the  Bald  had  adopted,  if  not  for  meeting  the  enemy  in  the 
open  field,  at  any  rate  for  troubling  as  far  as  possible  his 
advance,  had  achieved  a  measure  of  success.  When  we  were 
last  concerned  with  the  affairs  of  France,  Robert  and  Ramnulf, 
the  two  doughtiest  of  her  defenders,  had  just  fallen.  It  might 
have  been  expected  that  the  northern  troubles  would  have 
greatly  increased  after  the  Franks  had  sustained  such  a  loss. 
They  did  not  do  so  :  on  the  contrary  they  showed,  as  we  saw, 
a  sensible  diminution.  The  stubborn  resistance  of  Charles 
the  Bald  must  have  counted  for  something  in  this  result. 

Now,  therefore,  was  an  opportunity  for  the  rulers  of  Europe 
to   learn   the   lesson  which   the  terrible  disasters  of  the  last 


406  PAUSE  IN  THE  VIKING  RAIDS. 

twenty  years  had  preached  to  them.  Now  was  the  time  for 
them  to  put  aside  mutual  rivalries,  and  by  a  wise  alliance  and 
useful  co-operation  between  all  the  members  ot  the  Carling 
House,  to  raise  once  more  the  drooping  spirit  of  the  Franks. 
Now,  too,  was  the  time  for  the  Pope  to  call  to  arms  all  Western 
Christendom,  to  proclaim  a  first  crusade  against  the  two  great 
enemies  of  the  Christian  name — the  heathens  from  the  north 
and  the  Saracens  from  the  south. 

How  far  were  these  measures  adopted?  What  was  actually 
the  state  of  affairs  in  Europe  during  this  dodecade  of  the  great 
English  invasion,  from  866  to  878  ?  To  answer  this  question 
let  us  look  at  the  three  northern  kingdoms  in  Continental 
Europe,  beginning  with  the  eastern  and  travelling  westward. 

So  far  as  concerns  Lewis  the  German  it  must  be  said  that  he 
had  abandoned  the  thought  of  conquest  towards  the  west,  in 
the  territory  of  either  his  nephew,  Lothair  II.,  or  of  his  brother, 
Charles  the  Bald.  His  policy  was  directed  where  it  ought 
always  to  have  turned,  to  his  eastern  neighbours,  to  keeping 
in  subjection,  or  at  any  rate  at  peace,  the  Slavs  upon  his  borders 
— Sorabians,  Bohemians,  Moravians. 

Of  these  three  peoples  the  last  were  now  the  chief  troublers 
of  the  peace  in  the  German  kingdom.  Long  ago,  in  the  days 
of  the  civil  war,  Moimir,  the  tributary  Duke  of  Mahren,  had 
taken  advantage  of  that  period  of  disturbance  to  erect  his 
duchy  into  a  practically  independent  state.  But  Lewis,  when 
he  was  secure  of  his  own,  again  attacked  the  Moravian, 
deposed  him,  and  placed  his  nephew  Rastic,  or  Rastislas,  in 
the  duchy  in  his  stead.  This  act  was  almost  the  last  act  of 
authority  exercised  by  Lewis  in  Moravia.  Even  that  had  been 
closely  followed  by  a  crushing  overthrow  of  Lewis's  army  at 
the  hands  of  the  Czechs  of  Bohemia,  who  were  in  league  with 
their  neighbours  and  fellow-Slavs,  the  Moravians.     This  event 


POLICY  OF  LEWIS  THE  GERMAN.  407 

we  have  already  recorded.  It  happened  in  846,  three  years 
only  after  the  treaty  of  Verdun.  With  such  a  lesson  before 
him  at  his  accession  it  is  no  matter  for  wonder  that  Rastic 
trod  pretty  closely  in  the  steps  of  his  uncle;  that 
by  a.d.  855  he  had  raised  Moravia  into  the 
position  of  a  practically  independent  state.  In  that  year  Lewis 
the  German  set  on  foot  a  great  expedition  for  the  reduction  of 
Moravia.  But  it,  like  nearly  all  the  expeditions  undertaken 
with  this  object,  while  seeming  to  accomplish  something, 
effected,  in  the  end,  little  or  nothing.  As  the  Frankish  army 
advanced  into  the  enemy's  territory,  Rastislas  retreated,  and  he 
finally  shut  himself  up  in  one  of  those  marsh-girt  fastnesses  in 
which  his  country  abounded.  When  at  last  Lewis's  troops 
were  obliged  to  retire,  they  were  continually  harassed  by  the 
Maravi,  who  eventually  followed  them  across  the  Danube  and 
plundered  some  of  the  German  towns  upon  the  right  bank  of 
the   river.       In   a.d.    864,    Lewis    made   another 

.  .  A.D  864 

effort ;  and  on  this  occasion  he  allied  himself  with 
the  Khan  of  the  Bu'gars.  This  expedition  was  somewhat 
more  successful.  Rastislas  could  not  be  brought  to  an  engage- 
ment ;  but  he  sent  in  hostages,  and  consented  to  tender  some 
sort  of  homage  to  the  German  king.  But  in  our  present  year, 
866,  the  relations  between  the  Slavs  and  Teutons  were  again 
disturbed ;  nor,  between  this  year  and  that  of  the  capture  and 
death  of  Rastislas  four  years  later,  were  the 
borders  of  the  Ostmark  ever  secure  against  attack 
from  the  side  of  Moravia.  Thus  German  policy  had  now 
an  eastern  outlook,  as  well  as  a  western,  as  it  has  to  this  day. 
And  the  gravity  of  the  position  was  immensely  increased,  when 
to  the  fear  of  Slavonic  inroad  was  added  the  far  greater  terror 
of  the  invading  Magyars.  Magyar  horsemen  first  appeared 
upon  the  south-east  borders  of  Lewis's  kingdom  in  a.d.  862. 
It  was  not,  however,  till  after  the  end  of  our  period  that  they 


408  PA  USE  IN  THE  VIKING  RAIDS. 

began  to  be  a  real  teiror  to  Germany.  It  was  on  account  of 
this  eastern  policy  of  Germany  that  the  Ostmark,  the  Eastern 
Mark,  which  was  the  germ  of  the  Austrian  Archduchy,  grew 
more  and  more  in  importance  among  the  German  territories. 

This  Ostmark,  now  that  Lewis  was  getting  on  in  years — he 
was  sixty-four — and  had  grown-up  sons  with  whom  to  share 
the  cares  of  government,  was  put  especially  under  the  charge 
of  the  eldest  of  these  sons,  Carloman,  his  father's  and  mother's 
favourite,  and  from  what  we  can  learn,  a  handsome,  strong, 
brave,  and  active  prince  :  until  a  sad  mishap  befell  him  when 
he  had  scarcely  passed  middle  life.  But  to  show  any  favour  to 
one  son  was  to  excite  the  jealousy  of  the  others.  Lewis  the 
German's  sons  were  truly  his  children  in  this,  and  as  ready  as 
he  had  been  on  any  provocation  to  set  in  defiance  the  authority 
of  their  father.  The  second  more  especially,  the  ceqidvocus,  the 
Lewis  whom  our  historians  call  Lewis  the  Saxon,  was  constantly 
in  a  state  of  covert  rebellion  against  his  father  and  against 
the  interests  of  his  elder  brother  Carloman.  In  these  restless 
schemings  of  his,  Lewis  generally  contrived  to  obtain  the 
assistance  and  countenance  of  the  youngest  of  the  three 
brothers,  the  youngest  and  weakest,  a  timid,  diseased,  rashly 
rebellious  or  superstitiously  scrupulous  Charles,  whom  history 
knows  well  as  that  strange  sport  of  Fortune,  Charles  the  Fat.1 
The  second  preoccupation  of  the  aging  German  king  was 
now,  therefore,  to  keep,  as  far  as  he  might,  a  hand  over  his 
children  and  prevent  them  flying  at  each  other's  throats. 


• l  There  can  be  little  doubt  that  Charles  was  always  more  or  less  diseased, 
physically  and  mentally.  He  had  that  curious  mental  attack  during  the 
lifetime  of  his  father  (873).  {Ann.  Field.,  An.  X ant  en.  s.a.,  Vita  S., 
Rimbert.  c.  20,  &c).  Then  he  suffered  fearfully  from  headaches  during  his 
short,  inglorious  reign,  and  at  the  end  fell  into  a  state  of  complete  mental 
aberration.  The  name,  Charles  the  Fat,  was  not  bestowed  upon  him  by 
his  contemporaries.  But  he  was  corpulent — a  state  of  body  suggestive  of, 
yr  at  any  rate  consistent  with,  a  weakness  of  brain. 


POLICY  OF  LOTHAIR  IL  409 

Of  the  Carling  princes  just  now  upon  the  throne,  the  most 
unfit  to  rule  was  he  who  gover.  ed  the  central  kingdom — Lothair 
II.  It  was  from  him  that  the  central  kingdom  got  its  name  of 
Lotharingia,  Lorraine.  His  public  life  during  his  reign  of 
fourteen  years  is  almost  a  blank,  at  any  rate  after  his  early 
appearance  in  co-operation  with  Charles  against  the  Danes  in 
Oissel.  Lothair's  domestic  life  became  a  public  scandal,. and 
his  acts  in  connection  wiih  it  rose  to  the  importance  of  public 
acts  for  the  effect  which  they  had  upon  the  future  of  Church 
and  State.  His  whole  energies  were  devoted  to  obtaining  a 
divorce  from  his  wife  Thietberga,  in  order  to  marry  a  certain 
Waldrada,  his  former  mistress,  the  mother  of  a  beloved  son, 
Hugo;  according  to  his  declaration  (by  which,  therefore,  he 
accused  himself  of  bigamy)  she  was  his  lawful  wife  before  his 
marriage  to  Thietberga.1 

The  interest  with  which  these  divorce  proceedings  were 
followed  by  all  Europe,  the  degree  in  which  all  the  higher 
ecclesiastics  were  mixed  up  in  them  upon  one  side  or  the  other, 
and  in  which  the  Pope  himself  made  it  his  care  to  frustrate  the 
desires  of  Lothair,  form  one  of  those  incidents  in  mediaeval 
history  which  seem  to  remove  it  far  away  from  the  feeling  or 
the  policy  of  our  times.  But  the  whole  subject  belongs  more 
properly  to  the  ecclesiastical  than  to  the  civil  history  of  this 
century  ;  and  what  little  needs  to  be  said  about  it  will  be  said 
in  another  place. 

Its  importance  for  the  public  life  of  the  day  lay  chiefly  in 

the  degree  in  which  it  withdrew  the  attention,  not  of  Lothair 

alone,  but  of  many  of  the  greatest  politicians  of  Europe  from 

the  far  more  pressing  question  of  national  defence  against  the 

northern    invaders.      In    this    direction    Lothair   himself   did 

almost  nothing.     Even  the  great  Hincmar,  the  ruling  spirit  in 

1  The  history  of  this  important  process  is  recorded  in  the  Annates 
Bertiani (Prudentius  and  Hincmar)  and  in  II  incmari  opera.  Cf.  also  Mansi, 
vol.  xv.  or  Migne,  t.  119,  and  J^fle,  Rigest,  Font,  I.  346  (2072),  &c. 


410  PAUSE  IN  THE  VIKING  RAIDS. 

the  counsels  of  Charles  the  Bald,  forgot  much  which  he  should 
have  remembered  while  engaged  in  the  controversies  which 
sprang  out  of  the  Lotharian  divorce. 

Thus  in  the  western  kingdom  men  were  seduced  from  the 
wise  path  of  statesmanship.  Lothair's  errors  seemed  to  be 
Charles's  and  Hincmar's  opportunity.  They  ^tood  forth  as  the 
ch  impious  of  Christian  morality  and  of  the  authority  of  the 
Church  and  of  the  Pope.  And  though  the  Pope  (Nicholas  I.) 
and  Hincmar  subsequently  quarrelled,  Charles  ever  after 
remained  on  friendly  terms  with  the  Lateran,  and  enjoyed  the 
prestige  resulting  from  this  alliance — a  prestige,  be  it  said, 
which  French  kings  and  emperors  have  ever  since  sought  to 
retain,  and  which  is  expressed  in  the  title  of  the  old  French 
monarchy,  '  the  Eldest  Son  of  the  Church.'  This  alliance 
stood  Charles  the  Bald  in  good  stead  in  the  prosecution  of 
some  of  his  more  ambitious  schemes ;  but  it  was  an  evil  thing 
for  France,  which  in  these  days  required  from  its  ruler  not 
far-reaching  ambition  but  energy  and  capacity  at  home. 
Farther  off  than  ever  was  the  chance  of  a  union  among  all  the 
princes  in  Northern  Christendom,  and  therefore  of  a  last 
strenuous  effort  against  the  Vikings,  comparable  to  the  effort 
which  ^Elfred  was  making  on  behalf  of  the  English.  Had  the 
years  been  spent  in  preparations  for  that,  the  effects  of  the 
Oissel  disaster  might  have  been  reversed. 

Charles  the  Bald  had  now  fewer  difficulties  than  formerly 
with  the  rebellious  states  within  his  own  borders.  This  result 
was  chiefly  due  to  the  fact  that  he  had  given  way  on  the  chief 
points  in  dispute.  The  outcome  of  the  long  struggle  with 
Brittany  was  the  concession  of  practical  independence  to  their 
principality.  Erispoi,  the  son  and  successor  of  the  first  rebel 
Nominoi,  in  consideration  of  the  virtual  independence,  which 
he  had  won  by  his  victory  near  Rennes,1  consented  to  acknow- 

1  See  above,  p.  311, 


CHARLES  THE  BALD  AND  ER1SP0I.  411 

ledge  some  sort  of  suzerainty  on  the  part  of  the  French  king  \ 

and  thus  a  modus  Vivendi  was  found  between  them 

A.D.    851. 
(a.d.  851).1     It  was  decided  that  this  reconciliation 

should  be  <  emented  by  the  marriage  of  Prince  Lewis,  the  eldesl 

son  of  Charles  the   Hald,  and  the  ducal  princess  of 

/  n      ^\  rx,,  •  1       AD-      856-7. 

Brittany  (a.d.  856). 2  I  hat  marriage  never  took 
place.  A  year  after  this  peace  had  been  brought  about, 
Erispoi  was  murdered  at  the  instigation  of  his  kinsman, 
Salomon,  who  succeeded  him  upon  the  throne,  and,  if 
we  are  to  believe  Prudentius  of  Troyes,  the  intrigue  which 
brought  about  the  murder  had  not  gone  on  without  some 
countenance  from  Charles. 3  Salomon  consented  to  pay 
the  tribute  which  had  been  stipulated  in  the  case  of  his  pre- 
decessor, until  the  year  868 — the  year  which  we 
have  taken  as  our  standpoint  for  the  beginning  of 
a  review  of  the  state  of  Europe.  At  this  date  Charles,  finding 
himself  weaker  than  ever  after  all  the  past  years  of  Viking 
ravage,  and  Salom  >n  growing  restless  even  in  his  nominal 
dependence,  the  French  king  went  the  length  of  presenting  the 
Breton  duke  with  a  golden  and  jewelled  crown,  and  thereby 
recognizing  the  complete  independence  of  Brittany.  So  that 
Salomon  stepped  from  the  rank  of  a  duke  to  that  of  a 
king.4 

Of  Septimania,  or  Gothia,  we  hear  little  at  this  time.  When 
we  hear  of  it  again  we  find  a  Count  Bernard  ruling  there  once 
more.  This  Bernard  was  not  descended  from  that  older  Ber- 
nard whom  men  had  once  called  the  father  of  Charles  the 
Bald,  and  whom  Charles  afterwards  caused  to  be  beheaded  ■  5 
and  he  was   for  the  present  a  faithful  vassal  of  the  King  of 

1  Ann.  Bert.  s.a.  »  Ibid.  s.a. 

3  Ann.  Bert,  and  Wenck,  Gesch.  Jes  F.  R.  314.  4  Ann.  Bert.  s.a. 

^  s  Another  Bernard,  who  apparently  was  grandson  of  the  0  der  Marquis  of 
Gothia,  is  mentioned  about  this  lime  as  doing  homage  to  Charles. 


412  PA  USE  IN  THE  VIKING  RAIDS. 

West  Francia.  But  if  Charles  had  less  trouble  from  his 
vassals  then  formerly,  he  had  more  within  his  own  house- 
hold. The  ingrained  vice  of  the  Carlovingian  or  of  the  Frankish 
blood  began  now  to  show  itself  among  the  children  of  Charles 
the  Bald  as  it  had  already  shown  itself  among  the  chi'dren  of 
Lewis  the  German.  Only  in  the  case  of  the  West  Frank 
princes  there  were  not  so  many  quarrels  and  jealousies  among 
themselves  as  a  pretty  general  unanimity  in  thwarting  the  wishes 
of  their  father,  and,  when  occasion  offered,  in  supporting  their 
own  designs  by  arms.  Charles  the  Bald  seems  to  have  been 
especially  arbitrary  in  arranging  the  marriages  of  his  children, 
and  almost  all  their  recalcitrations  sprang  originally  from  their 
resentment  of  his  interference  with  their  own  choice  in  this 
matter.  In  truth,  it  is  curious  the  part  which  love  affairs  play 
in  the  politics  of  Europe  at  this  moment.  Here  on  one  side 
was  Lothair  II.  ready  to  stake  all  for  his  infatuation  for  his 
mistress  Waldrada.  In  England  ^Ethelwulf  had  endangered 
his  crown  by  his  union  with  a  young  French  princess ;  and 
presently  ^Ethelwulf's  son,  ^Ethelbald,  made  the  world  the 
witness  of  an  awful  scandal  by  his  marriage,  upon  the 
death  of  ^Ethelwulf,  with  his  stepmother,  this  same  princess 
Judith.1  The  grudge  of  Lewis,  the  son  of  Charles  the  Bald, 
against  his  father,  was  due  to  a  love  affair.  His  affections  were 
set  upon  a  certain  Ansgard,  'daughter  of  Count  Hardwin.'2 
Charles  always  opposed  the  marriage,  and  eventually  obliged 
Lewis  to  dissolve  it.  At  one  time  he  ordered  his  son  to  marry 
the  daughter  of  the  Breton  prince  Erispoi.  This  marriage  was 
frustrated,  as  we  saw,  by  the  murder  of  the  Breton  duke.  The 
young  Lewis  the  Stammerer's  private  troubles  in  this  kind  made 

x  See  above,  pp.   368-69. 

a  Ann.  Bert.  (Pertz,  i.  457),  Regino,  s.a.  878  (P.  i.  590).  Ansgard  was 
the  mother  of  Lewis's  two  sons  and  successors,  Lewis  and  Carlmann.  See 
next  chapter, 


JUDITH  AND  BALDWIN.  413 

him  sympathize  with  his  sister  Judith  in  her  love  affairs,  which 
were  of  a  sufficiently  scandalous  sort.  Judith,  after  the  de.ith 
of  yLthelbald,  returned  to  Francia  and  cast  her  eyes  upon 
Baldwin,  the  handsome  forester ;  she  allowed  him  to  carry  her 
off — as  by  force.  As  a  go-between  in  the  business,  acted  her 
brother  Lewis.1  Charles  was  highly  incensed  with  both 
children,  and  though  one  would  have  thought  there  was  no 
other  course  to  be  adopted,  he  long  opposed  the  legalization 
of  Judith  and  Baldwin's  connection  by  marriage.  The  Pope 
himself  had  to  intervene.  At  last  the  marriage  was  celebrated, 
but  Ciiarles  would  not  be  present  at  it. 

Later  on  we  shall  see  Charles,  in  his  turn,  past  his  middle 
age,  submitting  to  the  common  destiny,  and  on  the  death  of 
his  first  wife  falling  into  the  hands  of  an  intriguing  woman, 
with  intriguing  relations,  whereby,  among  other  things,  Hinc- 
mar  was  ousted  from  the  position  of  confidence  he  had  enjoyed 
about  the  king,  and  a  complete  change  of  policy  ensued  in  the 
West  Frank  kingdom. 

To  the  two  rebellious  children  of  Charles  the  Bald  already 
mentioned — Lewis  and  Judith — we  must  add  Charles,  king  of 
Aquitaine.  He,  too,  when  only  fifteen,  made  a  marriage 
against  his  father's  wishes.2  The  troubles  which  these  sons 
raised  up  had  been  felt  in  days  when  the  Vikings  were  still 
a  pressing  danger  to  the  Frankish  kingdom :  no  patriotic 
scruples  had  restrained  them.  The  most  serious  among  the 
risings  of  Lewis  occurred  in  862.  He  took  the  command  of  a 
body  of  Bretons,  and  marched  into  Robert  the  Strong's  terri- 
tory of  Anjou.  But  Robert  stood  firm  for  the  father  against 
the  son.  Lewis  was  defeated,  and  compelled  to  submit.  A 
kind  of  reconciliation  between  the  father  and  his  children 
followed,  resulting  in  the  sanction  of  Judith's  marriage,  though, 

1  Ann.  Bert.  s.a.  862.     Hincmar  says  that  Judith  followed  Baldwin  in 
male  attire.  2  Ann.  B.  (P.  i.  457). 


414  PAUSE  IN  THE  VIKING  RAIDS. 

as  we  have  said,  grudgingly.     But  Lewis,   who  had  taken  the 
occasion  to  marry  Ansgard,  was  forced  to  put  her  away  again. 

Thus  we  see  there  was  no  union  among  the  princes  of  the 
Frankish  Empire  for  the  common  good  ;  no  building  of  fleets 
in  fulfilment  of  Charlemagne's  desires  long  ago,  or  after  the 
pattern  of  what  Alfred  was  even  now  effecting  in  England.  No 
papal  bull  was  issued  calling  Christians  to  take  up  arms  against 
the  common  enemy;  no  Peter  the  Hermit  or  Bernard  preached 
a  first  crusade ;  no  Godfrey  arose  to  be  the  champion  of 
Europe.  Yet  the  Viking  invasions — we  may  begin  to  call  them 
invasions  now — were  far  more  threatening  than  any  desecration 
of  the  Sepulchre  in  Jerusalem  three  centuries  later ;  even  the 
Saracens  in  Italy  and  Sicily  were  a  greater  danger  to  Christen- 
dom than  in  the  twelfth  century  was  the  power  of  Salah-ed-Din. 

In  Italy,  indeed,  the  conduct  of  men  and  princes  was  more 
worthy — if  we  could  concern  ourselves  with  Italy.  There 
Lewis  the  emperor  was  engaged  in  a  heroic  struggle  against 
the  Saracens,  which  might  well  have  put  to  shame  his  brother 
and  his  uncles  beyond  the  Alps.  As  the  Vikings  in  the  north 
from  many  rebellious  vassals,  so,  shameful  to  tell,  the  Sara- 
cens found  support  among  the  last  representatives  of  the  old 
Lombard  dukedoms  in  the  centre  and  south  of  the  peninsula — 
the  Dukes  of  Beneventum  and  Salerno.  In  867  Lewis  began 
the  siege  of  Bari,  the  great  stronghold  of  the  Saracens  ever 
since  their  first  invasion  in  841.  At  length,  and  after  much 
delay,  by  the  he.p  of  a  Greek  fleet  he  completed  the  blockade 
of  the  town.     The  infidels,  reduced  by  want,  could  no  longer 

defend  their  walls  ;    at  the  beginning  of  871    the 
A.D.  871.        ,  ,  ,     ,  r    1 

place  was  stormed,   and  the  greater  part    of  the 

gainson  was  put  to  the  sword.  Almost  at  the  same  time  a 
Frankish  and  Lombard  army  under  the  command  of  the  Mar- 
quis of  Friuli,  gained  a  signal  victory  over  a  force  of  twenty 


THE  EMPEROR  LEWIS  II.  415 

thousand  Saracen  troops  who  were  marauding  in  the  Duchy  of 
Beneventum.1 

In  the  midst  of  this  victorious  career  a  misfortune  befell 
Lewis,  comparable  in  almost  every  respect  to  that  which  befell 
our  Richard  I.  on  the  return  from  his  successful  crusading  in 
the  Holy  Land.  Adalgis,  Duke  of  Beneventum,  had  hitherto 
fought  side  by  side  with  the  emperor,  much  as  Leopold  of 
Austria  had  fought  side  by  side  with  Richard  in  Palestine. 
But  it  was  noted  how  at  the  taking  of  Bari  he  had  used  his 
influence  to  shield  the  sultan  of  Bari,  when  the  rest  of  the 
garrison  were  slain.  It  was  said  that  the  sultan  had  earned 
his  gratitude  by  sparing  the  honour  of  Adalgis's  daughter,  who 
was  a  prisoner  in  the  city,  and  restoring  her  to  her  father  un- 
injured. Adalgis  now  carried  the  sultan  wi  hhim  as,  so  to  say, 
a  prisoner  on  parole.  The  Mussulman  succeeded  in  inflaming 
his  jealousy  and  his  fears  of  Lewis.  Adalgis  was  told  that  so 
soon  as  the  Moslem  war  was  over,  the  emperor  intended  to 
depose  him  and  incorporate  Beneventum  and  Salerno  into  the 
Italian  kingdom.  To  forestall  such  designs  the  duke  made  up 
his  mind  to  seize  the  person  of  Lewis  while  still  in  his  territory; 
and  having  done  this  he  kept  Lewis  a  prisoner  in  Beneventum. 
The  Pope,  all  Italy,  rose  in  fury.  Adalgis  had  to  release  his 
prey,  after  exacting  such  oaths  of  non  retaliation  as  he  thought 
necessary — oaths  from  which  Lewis  was  immediately  released 
by  the  Pope.  But  Lewis's  far-reaching  designs  for  driving  the 
Saracens  out  of  Italy  were  all  shattered.  The  southern  duke 
was  in  league  with  the  infidel ;  Lewis  had  to  retire  to  the  north 
and  concoct  his  measures  of  revenge  upon  the  Duke  of  Bene- 
ventum.2 

1  Hist.  Lomb.  Beneventi  post  P.D.  (Erchempert)  ap.  Muratori,  ii.  245, 
sqq.  ;  cf.  Diimmler  Ostf.  Gesch.  i.  704-5. 

2  Muratori,  I.e. ;  Reginonis,  Chron.  (Pertz,  583-5) ;  Diimmler,  I.e.  711 
sqq. 


416  PAUSE  IN  THE  VIKING  RAIDS. 

While  Lewis  was  engaged  in  his  Saracen  war  in  the  south 
a  -n  Q*a      °f  Ifaly  he  was  visited  by  his  brother  Lothair,  who 

A.JJ.  869.  m 

came  to  seek  his  influence  in  furthering  his  famous 
divorce  case.  Nicholas  I.,  Lothair's  untiring  adversary,  had 
died  in  a.d.  867,  and  a  new  pope  had  come  to  the  chair  of  St. 
Peter.  The  circumstances  of  the  meeting  between  Lothair 
and  Hadrian  II.  we  will  leave  to  another  chapter,  and  with 
them  the  history  of  Lothair's  false  oath  at  Monte  Cassino  and 
of  his  death  a  few  months  afterwards  at  Piacenza,  on  his  way 
home  to  his  own  country.* 

II. 

The  death  of  the  King  of  Lotharingia  was  a  great  event, 
affecting  the  whole  politics  of  Europe.  Each  of  the  remaining 
Carling  princes  prepared  to  assert  his  claim  to  the  inheritance 
of  the  dead  king.  Carl,  the  youngest  son  of  Lothair  I.,  the 
poor,  chetif,  epileptic  King  of  Provence,  had  died  some  six 
years  previously,  and  his  kingdom  had  been  divided  between 
his  two  brothers,  Lewis  getting  Provence  and  Lothair  Trans- 
jurane  Burgundy.  So  that  the  emperor  had  already  a  foothold 
upon  this  side  of  the  Alps.  There  could  be  no  question  that 
of  right  the  whole  inheritance  of  his  brother  should  have  fallen 
to  him,  now  the  only  surviving  son  of  the  first  Lothair.  He 
had  a  right  to  all  the  territory  which  had  been  assigned  to  his 
father  by  the  treaty  of  Verdun. 

None  had  deserved  better  of  the  Christian  commonwealth 
than  Lewis,  who  had  been  far  more  successful  in  his  wars 
against  the  Saracens  than  his  uncles  had  been  against  Mora- 
vians, or  Bretons,  or  Vikings.  No  wonder,  therefore,  that  the 
Pope  warmly  espoused  his  cause.  But  Lewis  had  in  truth 
done  his  duty  by  his  own  kingdom  too  well.     He  had  iden- 

1  See  Chapter  XVI. 


DEA  TH  OF  LOTH  AIR  II.     MEERSEN  TREATY.     417 

.tified  himself  with  Italy  and  Italian  affairs.  He  was  a  stranger 
to  the  pe<  pies  north  of  the  Alps.  And  it  is  certain  that  by  the 
late  subjects  of  Lothair  themselves  he,  of  all  the  claimants, 
would  have  been  the  least  welcome.  Lewis  was  moreover  at 
the  moment  too  much  engaged  over  his  siege  of  Bari  (which 
did  not  yield  for  two  years  yet)  to  be  able  to  support  his  just 
claims  by  arms. 

Charles  the  Bald,  on  the  other  hand,  had  been  so  fully 
prepared,  that  almost  directly  he  heard  the  news  of  Lothair's 
death  he  was  able  to  enter  Lotharingia  with  an  army.1  The 
energy  which  was  never  capable  of  making  a  decisive  resis- 
tance to  the  northern  invaders  was  at  the  service  of  Charles's 
personal  ambition  whenever  an  increase  of  territory  seemed 
likely  to  be  the  reward  of  promptitude.  Hincmar  supported 
his  sovereign  energetically  in  these  measures.  His  care  had 
been,  during  the  lifetime  of  Lothair,  to  support  the  cause  of 
justice  and  Thietberga  against  the  iniquitous  decisions  (such 
they  were  pronounced)  of  the  Councils  of  the  Church  of 
Lorraine.  He  might,  no  doubt,  have  found  better  outlet  for 
his  energies  at  home,  and  if  with  the  eye  of  prophecy  he 
could  have  seen  the  Viking  aimy  gathering  round  his  beloved 
Rheims,  he  might  have  thought  there  were  better  things  to  do 
than  to  promote  Charles's  adventures  to  the  east,  and  increase 
through  these  conquests  the  jurisdiction  of  his  own  archiepisco- 
pate.  A  humbler  sort  of  work  was  needed  there.  Where  were 
the  stones  which  had  fotmed  the  ancient  walls  of  St.  Remigius' 
city  ?  The  late  archbishop,  Ebbo,  had  removed  a  large  number 
in  order  to  build  therewith  a  new  cathedral,  and  the  walls  had 
not  been  built  up  again — a  bad  omen  in  such  days  as  these. 

Charles's  claims  to  Lotharingia  were  not  likely  to  remain 
undisputed.      If  the  Emperor  Lewis  was   powerless    for   the 

1  Ann.  Bert.  a.  869  (Pertz,  i.  482-4).  Hincmar  puts  his  own  gloss  on 
these  transactions. 

28 


418  PAUSE  IN  THE  VIKING  RAIDS. 

time,  not  so  was  Lewis  the  German.  He  was  hindered, 
indeed,  by  a  general  rising  of  the  Slavs  upon  his  eastern 
borders,  in  bringing  about  which  it  is  likely  enough  Charles 
had  a  hand.1  But  when  he  was  able  to  put  his  army  in  motion 
westwards,  Lewis  did  so  with  effect.2  Charles  did  not  venture 
to  maintain  his  position  at  the  point  of  the  sword ;  and  a 
division  of  Lotharingia  was  peaceably  arranged  between  the 
two  brothers  at  Meersen  (870). 

By  this  treaty,  setting  at  nought  the  claims  of  the  emperor, 
.  ^ all  Christian  Europe  north  of  the  Alps  and  east  of 

A.D.  870.  r  r 

the  Channel,  save  the  little  territory  of  Provence 
(Provence  east  of  the  Rhone),  was  divided  into  two  kingdoms, 
an  eastern  and  a  western.  Roughly  speaking,  the  boundaries 
of  Charles's  kingdom  may  now  be  taken  to  be  the  Rhone,  the 
Saone,  a  fragment  of  the  Moselle  from  near  Toul  to  just  south 
of  Treves,  then  across  to  the  Meuse  at  Liege  and  along  the 
course  of  that  stream  to  the  sea.  Roughly,  that  is  the  dividing 
line.  But  it  swerves  somewhat  to  the  east  of  the  Saone  and 
to  the  west  of  the  Moselle.  .  The  kingdom  of  Lewis  began  to 
the  east  of  this  line  and  to  the  north  of  the  Rhone,  and  of  what 
is  still  the  dividing  line  between  Italy  and  Switzerland. 3 

The  emperor  had  to  content  himself  with  the  thought  of  his 
Italian  victories.4  That  siege  of  Bari,  of  wh'ch  we  have 
spoken,  was  brought  to  an  end  in  871,  the  year  following  the 
partition  of  Meersen,  with  great  slaughter  of  Saracens,  and  the 
capture  of  Emir  Suliman,  as  we  have  seen.     Then  followed 

1  Ann.  Fuld.  (Pertz,  i.  381-2). 

a  Lewis  had  moreover  been  lamed  by  the  falling  of  a  building.  With 
great  stoicism  he  managed  to  conceal  the  injuries  he  had  received,  lest 
Charles  should  be  encouraged  thereby  (Ann.  Fuld.  s.a.  870). 

3  Ann.  Bert.  (Pertz,  i.  487-8). 

4  Lewis  the  German  did,  in  fact,  meet  the  Empress  Engelberga  at  Trent 
in  871,  and  agree  to  resign  his  share  of  Lotharingia  to  his  nephew  (cf. 
Pertz,  Leges,  i.  518).  But  he  revoked  this  concession  the  following  year 
(Ann.  Bert.  s.a.). 


DEATH  OF  THE  EMPEROR  LEWIS.  419 

Lewis's  brief  Coeur-de-Lion  captivity.  When  released  therefrom, 
Lewis  found  himself  confronted  by  two  sets  of  foes — Adalgis, 
with  his  Christian  allies,  and  the  old  enemy  the  Saracen.  Over 
these  last  he  did,  however,  gain  one  more  important  victory  in 
872,  in  which  nine  thousand  or,  according  to  some,  twelve 
thousand  of  the  infidels  were  slain. 

But   alas    for   Christendom !      In    875  a   comet   has  been 
flaming  in  the  sky  all  through  the  month  of  June,  g75 

and  before  the  grapes  are  gathered  a  melancholy 
procession  is  wending  along  the  road  from  Brescia  to  Milan. 
At  the  head  of  it  ride  the  Archbishop  of  Milan,  the  Bishops 
of  Brescia,  of  Bergamo,  of  Cremona.  With  mournful  hymns 
and  raised  crosses  they  are  bringing  to  its  last  resting-place  in 
Milan  the  mortal  remains  of  the  dead  Caesar,  Lewis  II.;  too 
early  dead.1  A  brave  and  pious  man,  though  the  fortune  of 
his  earlier  years  had  brought  about  one  sharp  collision  between 
him  and  Pope  Nicholas  I.,  ending  in  a  sacrilegious  attack  by 
his  troops  upon  Rome  and  the  mishandling  of  priests  and 
monks  in  the  very  train  of  the  holy  father.  Lewis  had  reigned 
as  a  really  independent  king  of  Italy  from  long  before  the 
death  of  his  father  in  855 ;  and,  save  for  the  inheritance  of 
half  of  his  brother  Charles's  Provencal  kingdom,  which  came 
to  him  in  863,  he  had  never  been,  in  fact,  much  more  than 
King  of  Italy,  though  he  bore  the  imperial  name.  Even  as 
King  of  Italy  he  had  little  power  over  the  Duchy  of  Bene- 
ventum,  the  Duchy  of  Spoleto,  and  other  remnants  of  Greek 
and  Lombard  rule.  But  if  he  had  lived  a  few  years  longer  he 
would  probably  have  united  these  to  his  crown,  have  driven 
the  Saracens  out  of  the  peninsula,  and  have  ruled  over  a 
unified  Italy.  His  death,  therefore,  was  a  heavy  mischance 
for  that  country  :  never  again,  through  all  the  Middle  Ages, 

1  Andreas  Berg.  (Muratori,  ii.);  Erchempert  (ibid.). 


420  PAUSE  IN  THE  VIKING  RAIDS. 

through  all  succeeding  centuries  until  our  own  day,  was  she  to 
know  what  it  was  to  be  a  united  Italy. 

Strange  that  the  family  of  Lothair  should  have  died  out  in 
this  manner,  while  his  two  brothers  still  remained  upon  their 
thrones  !  Here  was  a  new  field  of  ambition  open  to  the  two 
kings  beyond  the  Alps,  and  two  parties  were  formed  in  Italy — 
first  note  of  a  deep  division  in  her  politics — to  support  respec- 
tively the  French  and  the  German  interests.  We  think  of 
Henry  of  Luxemburg  and  Robert  of  Naples,  of  the  Avignon 
Popes,  or  of  Charles  of  Anjou  and  the  heirs  of  Frederick  the 
Great,  when  we  see  ranged  upon  the  French  side  the  pope 
of  these  days,  not  Hadrian  now,  but  his  successor,  John  VIII. , 
and  on  the  other  Engelberga,  widow  of  the  late  emperor,  and 
what  we  may  call  the  imperial  party.  Of  the  two  kings  them- 
selves, Germany  and  France,  in  whose  interests  these  parties 
were  formed,  Lewis  was  now  old  and  worn  with  the  fatigue  of 
a  long  reign,  obliged,  during  the  last  year  or  two  of  his  life  (he 
only  survived  his -nephew  one  year),  to  leave  the  government 
in  the  hands  of  his  sons  :  not  even  of  any  one  son,  for  their 
mutual  jealousies  were  great.  Otherwise,  Charles  the  Bald  had 
hardly  dared  to  raise  his  ambitious  hopes  so  high  as  to  the 
imperial  diadem. 

III. 

The  view  of  the  new  actors  who  are  stepping  upon  the  scene, 
and  of  the  greater  and  greater  difficulty  in  distinguishing 
among  the  princes  of  the  Carling  House  whom  we  have  met 
with  and  shall  meet,  let  us  pause  a  moment  at  the  death  of  the 
emperor,  while  as  yet  England  is  in  mortal  wrestle  with  her 
northern  invaders,  while,  except  for  slight  and  intermittent 
attacks,  the  Continent  has  been  left  at  peace,  and  try  to  get 
into  our  heads  all  the  different  scions  of  the  Carling  House,  all 


THE  CARL1NG  HOUSE.  421 

the  different  Charleses  and  Lewises  and  the  rest  who  have 
played  and  are  to  play  their  parts  in  this  history. 

Let  us  go  back  to  the  sons  of  Lewis  the  Pious.  These,  at 
least,  we  can  remember  :  Lothair,  Pippin,  Lewis,  by  the  first 
marriage  with  Irmingard ;  Charles  by  the  second  marriage 
with  Judith. 

Lothair's  sons  were  three,  as  likewise  we  remember  without 
difficulty. 

Lewis  II.,  called  so  because  he  was  the  second  emperor  of 
that  name,  his  grandfather,  Lewis  the  Pious,  being  the  first. 
He  married  Engelberga,  the  proud  empress,  daughter,  it  is 
believed,  of  the  Duke  of  Spoleto.  By  her  he  had  no  sons 
who  attained  maturity ;  but  he  had  a  daughter,  Engeltrud, 
who  played  her  part  in  history. 

Lothair  II.,  second  as  king  of  his  father's  transalpine 
kingdom,  or  the  greater  part  of  it,  which  from  him  took  the 
name  of  Lotharingia.  His  rule  did,  in  fact,  extend  from  the 
North  Sea,  including  the  modern  united  Netherlands  and 
Belgium  north  of  the  Scheld,  southwards,  roughly  speaking, 
between  the  Scheld  and  the  Meuse  in  the  west  and  the  Rhine 
in  the  east,  ending  with  a  line  drawn  between  Basle  on  one 
side  and  the  junction  of  the  Saone  and  the  Doubs  on  the  other. 
This  is  the  older  and  larger  Lotharingia,  a  name  which  in 
later  days  got  a  narrower  significance.  Afterwards,  when 
Charles,  the  King  of  Provence,  died,  and  his  inheritance  was 
divided  between  his  two  surviving  brothers,  Lothair  got  Bur- 
gundy and  Lewis  Provence,  the  larger  Provence  which  ex- 
tended northward  to  include  the  country  between  the  Rhone 
and  the  Durance.  Ho>v  Lothair  was  married  to  Thietberga 
and  loved  Waldrada,  and  all  his  efforts  to  break  his  marriage 
tie,  we  have  seen  or  seen  sufficiently.  He  had  no  children  by 
his  wife  ;  but  by  Waldrada  he  had  three  natural  children, 
two  of  whom  are  connected  with  our  narrative — Hugo,  after- 


422  PAUSE  IN  THE  VIKING  RAIDS. 

wards  known  as  Hugo  of  Lorraine,  and  Gisla  or  Gisella,  Hugo's 
sister,  married  (as  we  shall  see)  to  Godfred  the  Dane.  There 
was  a  third  daughter,  Bertha,  whom  we  may  forget  if  we  choose. 
Charles  was  the  third  son,  a  weakly,  epileptic  prince,  with 
good  dispositions  and  intentions.  Once  only  has  Viking 
history  anything  to  say  to  him — on  that  occasion,  namely, 
when  Bjorn,  Hasting,  and  their  fleet  took  winter  quarters  upon 
the  island  of  Camargue,  at  the  Rhone  mouth,  and  sailed  up 
the  river  as  far  as  Aries  and  Valence,  which  last  place  they 
plundered  and  burnt.  On  one  occasion  this  Charles's  uncle, 
Charles  the  Bald,  at  the  invitation  of  some  malcontents  of  the 
realm,  and  profiting  by  the  weakness  of  his  nephew,  made  an 
unprovoked  invasion  of  Provence,  in  the  hope  of  adding  some 
portion  of  it  to  his  own  territories.  But  he  had  to  beat  a 
humiliating  retreat.  When  this  Charles  of  Provence  died,  his 
brothers  divided  his  territory  in  the  way  that  has  been  de- 
scribed, and  unopposed  by  Lewis  the  German  or  Charles  the 
Bald. 

We  come  next  to  the  sons  of  Pippin,  who  have  already 
played  their  part  in  the  historical  drama,  and  therefore  may  be 
soon  dismissed. 

Pippin  was  the  elder,  the  pretender  of  Aquitaine,  or  at  any 
rate  the  pretender  to  South  Aquitaine,  the  Gascon  countries  :  he 
who  fought  by  the  side  of  the  Emperor  Lothair  at  Fontenoy,  who 
upheld  his  cause  for  long,  and  by  every  means  which  fell  to  his 
hands;  so  that  the  end  of  him  was  that  he  was  found  in  open 
alliance  with  the  Vikings,  having,  it  was  said,  forsworn  his  faith 
and  adopted  even  the  manners  and  mode  of  dress  of  the 
Northmen.  In  the  summer  of  a.d.  864  he  was  taken  prisoner 
by  Count  Ramnulf,  was  tried  by  his  peers,  and  condemned  to 
death,  but  spared  at  the  instance  of  Hincmar,  and  imprisoned 
for  life.     Thus  he  disappears  from  off  the  stage. 


CHILDREN  OF  PIPPIN.  423 

Charles  was  the  next  brother — he  is,  we  see,  already  the 
third  Charles  on  our  list,  and  by  no  means  the  last.  Threaten- 
ing also  to  rebel  against  his  uncle,  he  was  compelled  by  Charles 
the  Bald  to  take  orders,  and  obtained  from  Lewis  the  German 
the  Archbishopric  of  Mainz,  in  which  see  he  preceded 
Raban. 

The  next  of  the  sons  of  Lewis  the  Pious  is  Lewis  the 
German,  whose  career,  whenever  it  has  touched  the  subject  of 
this  history,  we  have  followed  with  sufficient  closeness.  He 
was  now,  in  875,  seventy-one  years  of  age,  and  near  the  end  of 
his  life  and  reign.  He  had  ruled  as  King  of  Bavaria  ever 
since  the  great  Divisio  Imperii  of  a.d.  817,  that  is,  since  his 
fourteenth  year  ;  and  as  king  of  nearly  all  Germany  since  the 
Treaty  of  Verdun  in  a.d.  843.  The  additional  portion  of  his 
kingdom,  acquired  since  the  death  of  Lothair,  he  had  governed 
six  years.  Lewis  had  three  sons — Carloman,  Lewis,  and 
Charles. 

Carloman,  the  favourite  of  his  father — against  whom,  not- 
withstanding, he  was  once  in  rebellion — and  still  more  of  his 
mother  Emma,  was  at  this  moment  a  handsome,  valiant,  and 
capable  prince,  ruling  in  practical  independence  Bavaria,  the 
Ostmark,  and  Carinthia,  keeping  a  watch  over  the  rebellious 
neighbouring  Slavs,  more  especially  against  the  Moravians  and 
their  Duke,  Suatopluk  or  Zwentibold.  Zwentibold  had  suc- 
ceeded to  his  uncle  Rastics,  against  whom  he  had  at  one  time 
sought  the  assistance  of  the  Franks ;  but  now  he  was  treading 
as  closely  as  possible  in  the  footsteps  of  his  predecessor.  Too 
complicated  is  the  history  of  Mahren  and  its  dukes,  and  too 
remote  from  the  history  of  the  Vikings,  to  occupy  us  here. 
Carloman  was  sometimes  at  war  with  Rastics  ;  once,  at  any 
rate,  in  alliance  with  him  against  Carloman's  own  father  the 
German  king.     But  he  remained  his  father's  favourite  till  the 


424  PA  USE  IN  THE  VIKING  RAIDS. 

death  of  Lewis  the  German.  He  had  no  legitimate  offspring ; 
but,  like  his  cousin  Lothair,  one  illegitimate  son,  Arnolf  by 
name,  who  occupies  a  conspicuous  place  in  the  later  history  of 
this  century.  Gisla,  or  Gisella,  the  sister  of  Arnolf,  married 
the  Zwentibold  of  whom  we  have  spoken.  The  jealousy  of 
Carloman's  brothers,  especially  of  Lewis,  much  crippled  the 
capacities  of  this  prince ;  and  a  sad  mischance  (of  which  we 
shall  have  to  speak  in  its  place)  cut  short  his  reign. 

Lewis  (our  third  Lewis,  alas  !)  was  the  second  of  the  sons  of 
Lewis  the  German.  Him  the  history  books— for  no  clearly 
assignable  reason — designate  4s  Lewis  the  Saxon.  Better  to  call 
him  Lewis  the  Younger,  as  some  writers  do.  He,  too,  proved 
himself  on  more  than  one  occasion  a  valiant  and  skilful  general 
and  ruler ;  but  he  was  likewise  a  turbulent  and  unruly  subject 
during  the  lifetime  of  his  father,  stirring  up,  to  aid  and  abet  him, 
I  lis  youngest  brother  Charles,  who  had  moments  of  bitter  re- 
pentance for  his  undutiful  conduct.  In  the  latter  portion  of  his 
reign,  moreover,  owing  probably  to  ill-health,  Lewis  seemed 
to  lose  all  vigour  of  character,  and  to  belie  the  promise  of 
his  earlier  years.  During  the  lifetime  of  his  father,  he  ruled 
chiefly  in  the  Franconian  territory.  To  this,  after  Lewis  the 
German's  death,  were  added  Saxony  and  Thuringia.  Finally, 
he  succeeded  before  the  death  of  Carloman  in  ousting  his 
brother  from  Bavaria,  and  in  practically  dethroning  him.  Lewis 
had  no  special  connection  with  Saxony  beyond  the  fact  that  he 
married  a  wife  out  of  a  very  famous  Saxon  house — that  of 
which  we  have  spoken,  whence  was  to  proceed  the  line  called 
that  of  the  '  Saxon  Emperors  '  in  Germany.  This  queen  was 
the  daughter  of  Liudolf,  niece,  therefore,  of  Cobbo,  and  sister 
of  Otto  and  Bruno,  famous  in  themselves,  but  much  more 
famous  in  their  offspring. 

Charles  (our  fourth  Charles)  was  the  t-ird  son  of  Lewis  the 
German.     His  original  kingdom  was  Swabia,  and  he  is  some- 


CHILDREN  OF  CHARLES  THE  BALD.  425 

times  called  Charles  of  Swabia.  History,  however,  knows  him 
by  a  more  familiar  title.  On  the  occasion  of  a  descent  into 
Italy  (whereof  we  must  speak  presently)  to  oppose  his  uncle 
Charles  the  Bald,  the  Italians,  to  distinguish  between  the  two 
Carlos,  gave  to  the  nephew  the  name  of  Carolito,  or  *  Little 
Charles.'  A  later  age,  however,  changed  this  name  to  one  of 
an  exactly  opposite  significance,  {  Charles  the  Fat,'  and  by  that 
name  he  is  known  to  history.  This  Charles  lived  to  inherit  all 
the  vast  domains  which  had  once  obeyed  the  awful  sceptre  of 
Charlemagne.  This  was  a  distinction.  But  Carolito  had  like- 
wise the  distinction  of  being  the  most  incapable  or  the  most 
unlucky  of  all  the  descendants  of  the  Great  Emperor,  the  one 
whose  inheritance  was  taken  from  him  and  given  to  strangers, 
not  his  children,  not  of  the  legitimate  Carling  blood  As  the 
Roman  Empire  has  its  Augustus  and  its  Augustulus,  so  has 
the  Carling  race  its  Charles  the  Great  and  Charles  the  Fat. 

Finally,  we  come  to  the  family  of  Charles  the  Bald.  Of  the 
father  we  need  say  nothing  special,  for  his  reign  is  intimately 
bound  up  with  the  history  of  this  century,  and  he  has  been,  and 
will  be  till  his  death,  constantly  before  us.  Like  his  father,  he 
married  twice,  once  in  youth,  and  once  past  middle  life.  By 
the  first  wife,  Irmintrud,  whom  he  married  in  A.p.  842  (he  was 
only  eighteen),  he  had  : — 

Lewis  (our  fourth  Lewis),  known  to  his  contemporaries  as 
Ludovicus  Balbus,  Lewis  the  Stammerer.  Eloquence  was  not, 
perhaps,  at  such  a  premium  in  those  days  as  in  ours.  But  it 
had  its  weight.  Many  are  the  stories  told  of  Charlemagne's 
readiness  of  speech,  even  in  matters  to  which,  to  say  the  least, 
he  must  have  been  a  little  strange  :  as,  for  example,  when  in 
the  presence  of  his  assembled  bishops  and  nobles,  as  also  of 
two  papal  nuncios,  he  made  an  unpremeditated  harangue 
refuting  the   heresy  of  the  Adoptians — those  who  maintained 


426  PAUSE  IN  THE  VIKING  RAIDS. 

that  Christ  was  not  the  actual,  but  the  adopted  Son  of  God. 
Any  marked  physical  defect,  moreover,  would  have  detracted 
from  the  prestige  of  even  the  wisest  of  men  and  kings  in  those 
days;  and  Lewis  the  Stammerer,  though  not  without  talents, 
was  not  the  wisest  of  men  and  kings.  In  his  father's  lifetime 
he  received  the  title  of  King  of  Neustria.  Of  the  part  he  took 
in  opposition  to  Charles  the  Bald,  and  in  the  furtherance  of 
the  marriage  between  his  sister  Judith  and  Baldwin  the  Forester, 
we  have  seen  something.  His  short  reign  we  have  still  to 
see. 

Charles  (our  fifth  Charles),  the  next  son,  was,  during  the 
lifetime  of  his  father,  a  more  conspicuous  personage  than  his 
elder  brother.  For  to  gratify  the  Aquitanians'  aspirations  for 
Home  Rule,  Charles  the  Bald  raised  this  son  to  the  rank  of 
an  almost  independent  king  of  Aquitaine.  He  commanded 
the  Aquitanian  army,  and  brought  it  as  a  contingent  to  the 
army  commanded  by  his  father  before  Oissel.  He  was  not 
behind  his  brother  Lewis,  nor  his  cousins  in  Germany,  in 
rebellious  schemes.  He  came  to  an  untimely  end  during  the 
lifetime  of  his  father.  He  was  returning  from  a  day's  hunting 
with  some  friends  of  his  own  age  and  in  a  'skylarking'  mood,  as 
we  should  say  ;  when  it  was  growing  dark  he  suddenly  rode  up 
to  one  of  them  who,  we  may  suppose,  had  got  separated  by 
some  little  distance  from  his  comrades,  and  made  as  if  to  attack 
him.  Alboin — this  was  the  name  of  the  young  man — in  the 
twilight  mistook  Prince  Charles  for  a  robber,  and  aimed  a  blow 
which  took  effect  upon  the  head  of  the  prince,  inflicting  a  deep 
wound  ;  and  though  Charles  did  not  die  immediately,  he  never 
recovered  from  the  effects  of  the  blow,  and  lingered  for  only 
two  years.  He  had  at  this  date  (a.d.  875)  been  dead  nine 
years. 

A  third  son  of  Charles  the  Bald,  Lothair,  was  pointed  out 
by  nature  for   an   ecclesiastic.     A  lame,  gentle,  and   retiring 


CHILDREN  OF  CHARLES  THE  BALD.  427 

prince,  he  was  made  Abbot  of  St.  German  l'Auxerrois,  and 
died  untouched  by  the  stream  of  worldly  politics. 

Carloman,  another  Carloman,  was  the  fourth  son  of  Charles 
the  Bald.  He  was  likewise  dedicated  to  the  Church,  and  be- 
came Abbot  of  St.  Medard,  an  abbacy  which  Hildwin  had 
held  in  former  days.  Carloman,  however,  did  not  fail  in  the 
family  tradition.  He  rebelled  against  his  father  and  sought  at 
the  same  time  to  divest  himself  of  his  orders.  He  was  more 
hardly  treated  than  any  of  the  other  rebel  sons.  Taken 
prisoner,  he  was  tried  and  condemned  to  lose  his  sight,  as  well 
as  to  a  perpetual  confinement.  Eventually  he  escaped  to  Lewis 
the  German,  under  whose  protection  he  ended  his  sightless 
days. 

But  we  must  not  leave  out  of  the  catalogue  of  the  children 
of  Charles  the  Bald  Judith,  whose  ill-starred  Melusina  beauty 
did  so  much  to  sow  divisions  both  in  her  own  country  and  in 
ours.  Of  her  scandalous  love  affairs  we  have  already  spoken, 
and  as  she  was  by  this  time  safely  married  to  Count  Baldwin  of 
Flanders  we  need  speak  of  her  no  more. 

By  his  second  wife,  Richildis,  sister  of  Count  Boso,  who  is  a 
conspicuous  person  during  the  years  to  come,  Charles  had 
several  other  children,  but  they  none  of  them  attained 
maturity. 

IV. 

Let  us  now  return  to  the  affairs  of  the  empire  at  the  point 
at  which  we  left  them — the  death  of  Lewis  II.  One  month 
after  this  event  a  council  of  grandees  was  held  at  Pavia  under 
the  presidency  of  Engelberga,  the  empress  widow.  But  though 
Engelberga  herself  was  wholly  in  favour  of  the  succession 
of  Lewis  the  German,  the  Council  was  divided.  On  his 
side,  the  Pope  (John  VIII.)  had  already  sent  a  message 
to  his  beloved  son  Charles,  inviting  him  to  come  and  receive 


428  PA  USE  IN  THE  VIKING  RAIDS. 

the  imperial  crown  in  Rome.1  The  French  king  had  been 
collecting  an  army,  and,  almost  at  the  same  time  that  the 
Council  was  being  held  in  Pavia,  he  crossed  the  Alps  and  pre- 
sently descended  upon  that  city,  where  he  was  welcomed  by 
his  partisans.2 

Meantime  the  other  Charles — Charles  of  Swabia,  Carolito — had 
been  commissioned  to  maintain  the  cause  of  his  father  Lewis.3 
He,  too,  crossed  the  Alps  and  entered  Lombardy.  But  he  had 
neither  troops  nor  courage  enough  to  venture  upon  an  engage- 
ment ;  and  at  the  approach  of  his  uncle  he  retreated  once  more 
across  the  mountains.  All  opposition,  however,  was  not  over : 
for  a  much  more  formidable  antagonist  to  Charles  the  Bald 
presently  appeared  in  the  person  of  Carloman,  Lewis's  eldest 
son,  with  a  Bavarian  army.*  Breaking  through  the  barriers 
which  Charles  the  Bald  had  sought  to  place  across  the  Alpine 
passes,  he  was  presently  within  a  day's  march  of  the  West 
Frank  army.  Thereupon  his  uncle,  abandoning  the  use  of 
force,  tried  his  hand  at  negotiation  and  craft.  He  engaged  to 
retire  upon  the  retirement  of  Carloman,  and  to  submit  his  case 
to  'arbitration  ';  the  arbitrator  to  be  his  own  rival  and  brother, 
Lewis  the  German.  No  terms  could  have  seemed  to  Carloman 
more  favourable ;  but  Charles  had  no  intention  of  keeping  to 
them.  When  Carloman  had  retired,  he  advanced.  And  now 
he  took  his  way  unopposed  to  Rome.  By  December  he  had 
reached  the  capital,  and  at  Christmas — in  imitation  of  the 
world-famous  coronation  of  his  grandfather  seventy-five  years 
before — he  received  the  imperial  diadem  at  the  hands  of  John 
VIII.5  By  March  he  had  returned  to  his  hereditary  kingdom 
of  Francia.6 

1  Ann.  Bert.  875  (P.  i.  498 ;  cf.  P.  iii.  722). 

2  Ann.  Fuld.  (P.  i.  389).  3  Ann.  Bert.  I.e.  «  Ibid. 
s  Ann.  Bert.  a.  876;  Regino,  a.  875. 

6  Lewis  the  German  revenged  himself  by  organizing  a  raid  into  Francia 
[Ann.  Bert.  I.e.). 


CHARLES  THE  BALD  CROWNED  EMPEROR.    429 

And  now  Charles  took  to  prinking  himself  out  in  the  costume 
of  the  Greek  emperors  in  despite  of  the  simpler  dress  of  the 
Frankish  kings.  He  clad  himself  in  the  long  Greek  dalmatica^ 
a  long  tunic  reaching  to  the  feet,  heavily  embossed  with  gold 
and  studded  with  jewels.  We  know  it  best  from  Byzantine  or 
semi-Byzantine  pictures  or  mosaics  of  Christ,  who,  even  on  the 
cross,  is  generally  clad  in  this  long  robe.  To  the  short  Frankish 
cloak  and  hose  it  was  contrasted  much  as  the  talaric  chiton  of 
the  Ionians  was  to  the  short  Attic  chiton. 

Lewis  the  German  always  adhered  to  the  Frankish  dress, 
which  certainly  was  in  its  way  sufficiently  striking,  a  tunic  or  shirt 
and  hose  of  fine  linen  dyed  some  brilliant  colour— scarlet,  may- 
be ;  to  this,  gilt  shoes  bound  to  the  leg  by  gilt  bands  reaching 
half  way  up  the  calf — cross-gartered,  in  truth,  like  Malvolio's. 
Gver  these  garments  was  worn  an  outer  cloak  ■  of  wool, 
fashioned  to  some  extent  like  the  Roman  toga.  This  is  the 
picture  we  must  draw  for  ourselves  of  Lewis  the  German,  and 
of  Charles  the  Bald  likewise,  before  he  took  to  his  fantastic 
Greek  attire,  and  of  the  Viking  leaders  too,  who  imitated  in 
almost  every  particular  Frankish  fashions — '  Welsh  (Frankish) 
reps  and  Welsh  swords,'  says  a  verse  of  the  Edda.  Scarlet  was 
a  very  favourite  colour  with  the  Northmen,  and  has  remained  so 
with  them  as  with  us  ;  as  witness  the  Danish  national  standard, 
the  Danebrog,  and  our  scarlet  uniforms. 

Could  it  be  expected  that  amid  these  glancing  new  fortunes 
Charles  the  Bald  would  have  much  time  to  attend  to  such  old 
humdrum  matters  as  a  wise  economical  government  at  home,  or, 
above  all,  to  the  vigilant  defence  of  his  coasts  against  the 
enemy  from  the  north?  France  had  been  miraculously  free 
from  attack  of  late  years.  It  would  seem  as  if  Providence  were 
determined  to  give  her  one  more  chance  ;  or  as  if  the  gods  had 
determined  to  madden  her  the  more  by  over-confidence,  seeing 
that,   without  reason  or  ascertainafre   cause    (that  she   could 


43o  PAUSE  IN  THE  VIKING  RAIDS. 

understand),  the  threatening  powers  had  drawn  off  just  when 
the  weakness  of  the  empire  was  becoming  more  and  more 
apparent.  During  this  period  we  need  to  record  but  one  impor- 
tant attack  made  by  the  Northmen.  It  was  made  in  873  in  the 
Loire  district.  After  plundering  on  all  sides  the  Vikings  took 
Angers.  Charles  collected  troops  to  attack  them  there,  and  in 
order  to  make  his  attack  a  surprise,  he  gave  it  out  that  he  was 
preparing  an  expedition  against  the  Bretons  and  their  king 
Salomon  (Salomo),  with  whom  he  bad  in  reality  entered  into 
alliance.  Suddenly  the  Frankish  army  turned  upon  the  camp 
of  the  Northmen  ;  and  it  was  joined  by  a  contingent  of  Bretons 
under  Wigon,  the  son  of  Salomon.  But  though  the  Vikings 
were  at  first  hard  pressed,  not  much  was  effected  by  this  con- 
certed attack.  The  siege  of  Angers  dragged  on  from  August 
to  October.  At  last  the  Northmen  came  to  terms,  and  agreed 
to  abandon  their  stronghold  and  all  the  Frankish  territory  if  a 
safe  conduct  were  assured  them  back  to  the  sea.1 

And  now  further  prospects  seemed  to  open  before  Charles 
the  Bald;  for  just  one  twelvemonth  after  the  death  of  Lewis 

a  D  «7fi  ^e  Emperor,  that  is  to  say  in  August,  876,  died  the 
emperor's  uncle  and  namesake,  Lewis  the  Ger- 
man.2 As  we  have  seen,  this  Lewis  had  been  King  of  Bavaria 
for  nearly  sixty  years,  and  in  almost  all  the  rest  of  his  dominions 
for  more  than  thirty  :  a  clear-eyed,  brave,  hard-working  king. 
Through  all  the  long  years  of  his  reign  Fate  never  allowed 
him  to  rest  and  be  thankful.  No  doubt  he  reaped  in  part  the 
evil  seed  he  had  sown.  His  rebellious  sons  were  but  follow- 
ing the  example  of  their  father,  when  they  made  his  last  years 
years  of  trouble  and  not  of  peace.  With  them,  with  Moravians, 
Sorabians,  Czechs,  Danes,  malcontent  Saxons,  nobles  mutually 
jealous,  he  had  had  to  encounter  with  a  sea  of  troubles  during 

1  Ann.  Bert.  ;  Regino,  s.a.  (Pertz,  i.  496,  585). 

3  In  the  palace  of  Frankfurt,  August  28.    Regino  (P.  i.  588). 


DEATH  OF  LEWIS  THE  GERMAN.  431 

his  long  reign.     He  had  affronted  all;  had  issued  from  the  long 
battle  of  life  if  not  wholly  victorious,  at  any  rate  not  beaten. 

The  vast  kingdom  which  the  German  king  had  governed 
with  so  firm  a  hand  was  at  once  parcelltd  among  his  sons. 
Carloman,  the  eldes:,  got  Bavaria  with  the  East  Mark,  and 
with  Carinthia  (no  lo.  g  r  an  Italian  province).  These  he  had 
long  ruled  in  practical  independence.  Lewis  got  Saxony, 
Thuringia,  Eastern  Lorraine  and  the  Danish  Mark  :  his  to 
keep  the  keenest  watch  against  incursions  of  the  sea-folk. 
Charles  (Carolito)  got  Svvabia  and  Elsass. 

Charles  the  Bald,  we  remember,  had,  at  the  death  ofLothair 
II.,  hoped  and  tried  to  add  to  his  own  kingdom  the  whole  of 
Lotharingia.  But  when  Lewis  the  German  armed  and  prepared 
to  dispute  his  title,  he  gave  way ;  and  the  dispute  resulted  in 
the  peaceful  div^ion  of  Meersen.  Now,  however,  an  oppor- 
tunity seemed  to  offer  for  realizing  that  abandoned  dream  of 
ambition,  now  that  his  redoubtable  brother  was  no  more.1 

Lewis  the  Younger  was  indeed  no  novice.  He  had  received 
his  baptism  of  fire  seven  and-twenty  )ears  ago.  But  at  his 
back  were  not  the  forces  of  the  whole  German  land,  only  that 
of  his  own  kingdom  ;  for  it  was  not  to  be  supposed  that  his 
two  brothers,  with  so  much  upon  their  hands,  would  uphold 
the  cause  of  Lewis  the  Saxon  by  their  arms.  Charles  the  Bald, 
too,  may  have  remembered  the  abortive  invasion  of  his  own 
territories  by  the  same  antagonist  twenty-two  years  before. 
So  that  there  was  an  old  score  to  settle  between  the  uncle  and 
nephew. 

Yet  how  many  worthier  calls  there  were  upon  the  energies  of 
Charles  the  Bald.  The  same  autumn  in  which  Lewis  the 
German  died,  a  new  Viking  fleet,  strong  one  hundred  sail,  came 
navigating  up  the  Seine,  the  first  that  had  sought  those  waters 

1  Regino,  I.e. 


432  PAUSE  IN  THE  VIKING  RAIDS. 

for  ten  years.  The  Northmen  were  now  beginning  to  drift 
back  from  England,1  where  there  was  not  much  room  for 
further  conquest,  and  where,  if  there  had  been  much  to  gain, 
there  had  been  much  to  suffer  likewise. 

Not  only  did  France  call  for  the  protection  of  the  king,  but 
Italy  was  in  dire  distress.  The  Saracens  were  filled  with  new 
hopes  now  that  their  arch-enemy,  the  late  Caesar,  was  dead ; 
they  were  now  spreading  far  beyond  their  ancient  limits, 
storming  across  the  Campagna  to  the  very  gates  of  Rome. 
Pope  John  wrote  in  piteous  distress  to  'his  dearest  son  and 
most  gracious  emperor,  by  God  Himself  created  to  be  our 
refuge,  our  comfort,  and  our  help.'  But  the  refuge,  comfort, 
and  help  remained  obstinately  deaf.  To  be  called  Caesar 
Augustus,  to  wear  the  Greek  dalmatica  and  a  costly  jewelled 
diadem,  this  was  one  thing;  the  concomitant  duty  of  defending 
his  new  territories  and  keeping  the  infidel  in  check,  this  was  a 
part  of  Csesardom  for  which  Charles  felt  less  inclination. 

The  attack  on  Lotharingia  appeared  to  him  an  easier  or 
more  inviting  adventure.  I  do  not  know  how  many  times 
Charles  and  Lewis  the  German  had  entered  into  mutual 
guarantees  of  each  other's  territories  for  themselves  and  their 
heirs.  It  was  a  wanton  violation  of  justice,  this  attack,  such  as 
Hincmar,  who  approved  the  first  invasion  of  Lotharingia, 
would  never  have  sanctioned  had  he  kept  the  conscience  of 
the  king. 

But  Hincmar's  reign  was  over.  A  young  wife  now  possessed 
Charles's  ear.  He  had  married  Richildis  almost  immediately 
after  the  mourning  for  his  first  wife,  Irmintrud,  who  died  in 
869,  was  over,  and  in  the  intervening  period  after  the  death 
of  Irmintrud,  he  had  possessed  her  as  his  mistress.  With  the 
weakness  of  an  old  husband,  he  allowed  all  the  credit  at  Court 

1  Cf.  Ann.  Fidd.  876, 


INVASION  OF  EAST  LOTHARINGIA.  433 

to  Richildis's  kin  ;  more  especially  to  her  ambitious  brother, 
Boso.  Boso  had  been  made,  in  871,  Count  of  Vienne,  on 
the  acquisition  of  the  province  by  Charles  the  Bald,1  and  he 
was  already  working  hard  to  lay  the  foundation  of  a  power  in 
that  territo  y  which  eventually  earned  him  a  crown. 

The  time  was,  upon  the  whole,  favourable  to  Charles's  new 
undertaking.  True  there  was  hat  fresh  influx  of  Vikings  into 
the  Seine  which  demanded  attention  ;  but,  on  the  other  hand, 
Aquitaine  was  in  a  more  peaceful  condition  than  it  had  been 
for  a  generation.  It  was  once  again  an  integral  part  of  the 
western  kingdom.  Even  Brittany  paid  Charles  tribute  and 
remained  within  her  borders ;  for  the  name  of  emperor  still 
carried  with  it  a  moral  force,  was  still  awe-inspiring  in  a  certain 
degree. 

Lewis  the  Younger,  on  his  side,  when  he  heard  of  the 
approach  of  his  uncle,  was  fully  conscious  of  the  dangers  which 
encompassed  him.2  His  army  was  hastily  gathered  together, 
and  not  half  so  large  as  that  commanded  by  Charles  the  Bald. 
The  latter,  too,  consisted  chiefly  of  Franks,  who  still  bore — for 
their  elan,  or  whatever  it  might  be — the  highest  military  repu- 
tation of  any  among  the  nations  of  Christendom.  Lewis,  no 
doubt,  had  a  good  contingent  of  East  Franks  with  his  colours  ; 
the  rest  of  his  troops  were  chiefly  Saxons.  At  first  the  German 
king  tried  what  could  be  done  by  negotiation.  He  sent 
messengers  to  Charles  the  Bald,  and  these  appealed,  as 
diplomatists  not  unfrequently  did  in  those  days,  to  the  con- 
science of  their  adversaries.  They  recalled  to  Charles  the  oaths 
to  his  dead  brother,  and  reminded  him  that  there  yet  lived  a 
God,  the  avenger  of  the  innocent,  the  punisher  of  the  forsworn. 
But  these  words  made  no  impression  upon  the  West  Frank 

1  It  was  wrested  from  Lewis  in  870. 

a  Ann.  Fuld. ;  .  Ann.  Bert.  ;  Ann.  Xant. ;  Regino,  S.a.  876,  for  the 
account  which  follows. 

29 


434  PA  USE  IN  THE  VIKING  RAIDS. 

king.  In  his  reply  he  anticipated  (oddly  enough)  the  excuse 
which  the  Vikings  were  to  make  in  after-years,  to  his  West 
Frank  subjects  for  an  act  of  treachery  similar  to  his  own. 
His  oaths,  he  said,  had  been  given  to  the  dead  Lewis,  not  to 
any  of  his  sons. 

The  demand  which  Charles  made  of  his  nephew  was,  we 
have  said,  the  eastern  part  of  Lotharingia,  which  had  been  the 
elder  Lewis's  share  at  the  Treaty  of  Meersen.  It  was  the  very 
same  claim  which  France  put  forward  under  the  Napoleons, 
and,  maybe,  will  some  day  put  forward  again — the  Rhine  was 
to  flow  as  the  boundary  between  the  eastern  and  western 
kingdoms.  And  as  the  German  soldiers  assembled  under  the 
banners  of  Lewis  the  Saxon  when  he  made  his  camp  at  Deutz, 
they  were  no  doubt  singing,  in  the  fashion  of  their  day  : — 

Sie  sollen  ihn  nicht  haben, 
Den  freien  deuts-hen  Rhein. 

From  where  they  pitched  their  tents  they  could  see  the  other 
side  of  the  river,  the  '  hohe  Dom  '  of  Cologne,  mirroring  itself 
in  the  swift  waters  ;  but  they  dared  not  reach  it,  and  under  its 
shadow  the  enemy  presently  established  their  head-quarters. 
Thus  Charles  already  occupied  the  disputed  territory. 

How  to  drive  him  out  again?  At  Deutz  Lewis  received 
his  returned  ambassadors  and  saw  that  there  was  no  alternative 
for  him  but  battle  or  surrender.  He  found,  too,  that  he  had 
now  an  army  of  tolerable  strength.  His  object  was  to  cross 
the  river,  if  possible,  unperceived.  Leaving,  therefore,  his 
camp-fires  burning,  he  moved  off  his  troops  during  the  night 
of  the  4th  and  5th  of  October,  and  after  a  secret  and  hasty 
march,  admirably  executed,  he  crossed  the  Rhine  unopposed 
between  Coblenz  and  Andernach.  Only  when  the  passage  of 
the  river  had  been  safely  accomplished  and  Lewis  established 
in  a  position  among  the  hills  commanding  the  valleys  of  the 


BATTLE  OF  ANDERXACH.  435 

Nelte  and  Drohl  did  Charles  hear  of  what  had  been  done. 
Thereupon  he  broke  up  his  camp  at  Cologne  and  marched  to 
Sinzig.  Here  he  was  met  by  messengers  from  Lewis,  once 
more  making  proposals  of  peace,  and  Charles,  upon  his  part, 
had  recourse  to  one  of  those  ruses  which  had  so  often  served 
his  turn  bU'er  than  arms,  though  to  a  nicer  conscience  they 
might  wear  the  garb  of  perjury.  He  proposed  a  meeting  of 
plenipotentiaries  for  the  7th  of  October,  to  discuss  the  terms 
of  a  treaty  of  peace.  Lewis  assented,  and  on  the  assumption 
that  a  truce  was  established  during  the  interval  he  sent  off 
half  his  army  in  search  of  provisions.  Charles  had  no  sooner 
been  informed  of  this  by  his  scouts,  than  he  broke  up  his 
camp  at  Sinzig,  and  marched  with  all  his  army  of  fifty  thou- 
sand men  straight  for  the  German  camp. 

The  Germans  were  saved  from  surprise  by  two  lucky  chances. 
Willibert,  Archbishop  of  Cologne,  Lewis's  envoy,  found  the 
means  of  sending  a  swift  messenger  to  his  king  to  warn  him  of 
his  danger ;  and  the  native  guides,  who  were  all  for  Lewis, 
managed  so  to  misdirect  the  army  of  Charles  in  this  hilly 
region,  that  it  took  twenty-four  hours  in  making  a  march  of 
some  twelve  or  fourteen  miles. 

Lewis,  meanwhile,  not  knowing  of  this  delay,  but  only  the 
peril  in  which  he  stood,  gathered  all  the  remainder  of  his  army 
and  drew  them  up  in  array  of  battle.  Expecting  a  night  attack, 
in  order  to  avoid  confusion  and  consequent  panic,  he  ordered 
that  every  man  should  put  on  a  white  garment  over  his  usual 
armour.  And  all  the  night  of  the  7th  of  October  the  army 
remained  there  like  a  little  white  cloud  resting  upon  the 
hills  which  commanded  the  valley.  It  was  a  miserable  night, 
pouring  with  rain.  But  the  case  of  the  Germans  was  not  so 
wretched  as  that  of  their  opponents,  who  through  all  that  night 
floundered  about  upon  false  roads,  an  1  only  in  the  morning 
came  in  sLht  of  their  enemy,  whom  they  found  small  in  num- 


436  PAUSE  IN  THE  VIKING  RAIDS. 

bers  indeed,  but  drawn  up  in  a  good  position  and  ready  for 
battle. 

The  first  shock  fell  upon  the  Sax  ns  who  composed  Lewis's 
first  line.  At  the  onset  of  that  vast  body  of  fifty  thousand  Franks, 
the  Saxons  shook  and  gave  way  somewhat.  But  the  East 
Franks  came  up  to  their  support,  and  the  movement  of  retreat 
was  arrested.  And  now,  on  the  French  side,  men  perceived 
that  at  the  first  charge  Count  Hieronymus  had  gone  down,  one 
of  the  leaders  in  Charles's  army ;  Count  Reginar,  too,  had 
fallen  with  the  oriflamme,  the  imperial  banner.  The  Carling 
troops  had  expected  to  surprise  their  enemy.  Not  doing  this, 
they  were  already  disheartened ;  and  by  their  long  night's  march 
they  were  almost  worn  out.  When  they  saw  their  banner  fall, 
and  their  king  came  not  up  to  encourage  them,  they  gave  way 
at  once  upon  all  sides.  They  broke  and  rolled  back  in  irre- 
trievable panic,  and  Charles,  who  had  never  once  come  to  the 
front  of  the  battle,  could  now  find  nothing  better  to  do  than  to 
set  spurs  to  his  horse  and  ride  for  dear  life.  He  rode  all  that 
day,  rode  far  out  of  the  disputed  Lotharingian  country,  and 
did  not  draw  rein  till  he  had  reached  Liege,  safe  in  his  own 
territory. 

Fortunately  for  Charles  the  Bald,  he  had  sent  forward  his 
wife,  Richildis,  who  was  with  child,  away  from  the  battle-field, 
as  far  as  Herstal,  in  order  that  she  might  give  tidings  of  what 
he  deemed  a  certain  victory.  Hut  Herstal  itself  was  within 
the  territory  of  Lewis  the  Younger,  and  to  Richildis  there  came 
the  news  of  the  fearful  overthrow  of  the  West  Franks.  Though 
ill-fitted  to  travel,  she  had  to  flee  thence  under  the  charge  of 
the  Bishop  of  Liege  and  the  Abbot  of  St.  Omer.  On  her  way 
she  was  brought  to  bed  of  a  boy,  untimely  born,  and  soon  to 
die.  This  was  the  last  of  four  children  that  Richildis  had 
borne  to  Charles,  none  of  whom  attained  to  manhood. 

The  battle  of  Andernach  was  the  greatest  which  had  been 


BATTLE  OF  ANDERNACH.  437 

fought  since  Fontenoy.  We  may  call  it,  too,  the  first  great 
battle  between  France  and  Germany — the  first  of  how  long  a 
series  !  Have  we  not  said  that  this  age  was  big  with  the  seeds 
of  the  future  policy  of  Europe?  The  defeat  was  deemed  a 
direct  judgment  of  God  upon  the  perfidy  of  Charles  the  Bald. 
Inexplicable  panic  had  seized  the  troops  of  Charles  almost  at 
the  sight  alone  of  Lewis's  little  white  cloud  resting  upon  its 
hillside.     So  some  of  the  prisoners  declared. 


CHAPTER  XIV. 

CHARLES  THE  FAT.    THE  INVASION  OF  GERMANY. 

I. 

The  battle  of  Andernach  took  place  on  the  8th  of  October, 
a.d.  876.  The  Vikings  at  this  moment  had  begun  to  return 
to  the  Continent ;  but  no  large  fleet  had  as  vet  come  thither. 
For  in  England  the  Danes  were  still  advancing  to  victory  over 
the  West  Saxons  ;  wherefore,  when  pirate  fleets  were  newly 
equipped,  most  of  them  were  still  commissioned  for  this 
country.  Nevertheless  some  of  the  Vikings,  steing  the  greater 
part  of  England  already  in  possession  of  their  brethren,  and 
the  remaining  portion  holding  out  valiantly  against  them, 
remembered  the  rich  abbeys  and  fat  lands  of  Flanders  and 
France,  which  had  been  left  undisturbed  so  long. 

When  Charles  the  Bald  recovered  from  the  panic  into  which 

his  defeat  had  thrown  him,  he  found  that   his  nephew,  Lewis, 

had  no   intention  of  carrying  his  victorious  arms 

A.D.  877. 

into  France ;  on  that  side,  therefore,  he  might  feel 
secure.  But  in  Italy,  but  in  his  imperial  title,  there  was  small 
likelihood  that  he  would  be  left  undisturbed.  In  any  case 
Carloman  might  have  been  expected  to  try  and  revenge  the 
trick   which    had    been   played    upon    him    the    year    before. 


CHARLES  THE  BALD  IN  ITALY.  439 

Many  of  Charles  the  Bald's  former  partisans  now  withdrew 
their  support ;  and  Carloman  of  Bavaria  was,  in  fact,  collecting 
an  army  and  meditating  a  fresh  incursion  into  Italy.  The 
Pope,  however,  remained  true  to  the  French  alliance ;  though 
he  did  so  at  his  peril.  The  lesser  princes,  as  we  may  call  them, 
of  central  and  southern  Italy  were  seeking  alliances  of  any 
kind,  even  with  the  Saracens,  against  the  Carling  rule.  The 
Pope,  John  VIIL,  too,  had  long  had  a  personal  quarrel  with 
the  Duke  of  Spoleto ;  his  devastating  troops  and  the  infidel 
arms  of  the  Saracens  now  spread  up  to  the  very  gates  of 
Rome.1 

John  sent  messenger  after  messenger  with  the  most  pressing 
entreaties  to  Charles  the  Bald  to  come  to  his  aid.  This  time 
Charles  determined  to  comply  ; 2  albeit  the  fleet  of  Northmen 
which  had  arrived  in  the  Seine  the  previous  year  was  still 
plundering  in  that  country  unhindered.  It  is  characteristic  of 
Charles's  policy  during  these  later  years  that,  without  striking 
one  blow  to  free  his  country  from  such  a  pressing  evil  as  this, 
he  should  have  set  to  work  to  collect  an  army  to  march  into 
Italy,  and  have  consented  to  purchase  the  departure  of  the 
Vikings  for  the  enormous  sum  of  five  thousand  pounds  of 
silver,  equal,  one  may  say,  in  modern  money  to  as  much  as 
^"120,000.3 

Charles  put  some  order  into  his  affairs  before  he  set  out. 
He  held  a  council  at  Quiersey4  in  which  he  exacted  a  fresh  oath 
of  fidelity  from  all  the  greater  vassals.  In  return  he  made  an 
important  concession  to  the  growing  feudalism.  Pie  distinctly 
acknowledged  the  hereditary  principle  in  the  holding  of  fiefs. 
It  had  not  been  acknowledged,  nor  were  the  rights  of  minors 
guarded  when,  ten  years  before,  the  possessions  of  Robert  the 

1  Mansi,  xvii.  27,  &c  ;  Jarfe  (2nd  ed.),  3077-9,  3081  sqq. 

2  Ann.  Bert.  s.a.  (Pertz,  i.  502).         3  Cf.  Dummler,  Ostf.  Gesch.  u.  43. 
4  Conventus  Cariacensis,  ap    I'<  ri/.  Leges,  i.  537  sqq. 


440  THE  INVASION  OF  GERMANY. 

Strong  were  handed  over  to  Abbot  Hugh,  ard  Robert's  sons 
were  left  poor  and  insignificant.  Abbot  Hugh  was  now  the 
foremost  man  in  the  kingdom  ;  or  his  only  rival  was  Boso, 
brother  of  the  empress.  This  empress  and  her  brother,  with 
Hugh,  Hincmar,  Bernard,  Count  of  Auvergne,  Theodoric,  the 
High  Chamberlain,  Franco,  Bishop  of  Liege,  and  Gozlin  or 
Jocelin,  Abbot  of  St.  Denis,  formed,  with  the  Prince  Lewis, 
a  sort  of  regency  in  the  absence  of  the  king.  They  were 
specially  enjoined  not  to  believe  too  hastily  any  rumours  of 
the  death  of  their  sovereign.  Then  Charles  set  forth  upon 
his  march  into  Italy. 

Italy,  that  fatal  land.  Everybody  was  drawn  thither  by  its 
thousandfold  fascinations.  Its  wealth  was  of  many  kinds ;  of 
which  not  the  least  considered  in  those  days  was  its  wealth  in 
relics,  in  the  bones  of  saints  and  martyrs.  Every  conqueror 
from  the  north  sought  to  draw  upon  this  mine  of  magical 
power  ;  and  failing  the  use  of  force,  fraud  might  be  legitimately 
employed  to  gain  possession  of  the  wonder-working  bones.1 
But  the  climate  of  Italy  revenged  the  country  upon  her 
spoilers.  It  had  already  struck  down  one  of  the  Carling 
princes — Lothair.  His  father  narrowly  escaped  death  what  tirre 
Wala  and  Matfrid  of  Orleans  and  many  another  found  their 
graves  in  Italy.  Lewis,  the  elder  son — he,  too,  had  died 
young.     Now  Italy  called  for  fresh  victims  from  their  house. 

Charles  had  not  been  long  across  the  Alps.  He  had  met  the 
Pope  John  at  Pavia,  and,  at  a  council  of  130  bishops  held  at 
Ravenna,  had  been  re-elected  emperor,2  when  news  was  brought 
that  Carloman  was  marching  over  the  Brenner,  3  with  forces 
against  which  Charles  deemed  himself  unable  to  make  head. 

1  Cf.  Einhard,  Transl.  BB.  Marc,  et  Pet.,  c  1  (Migne,  t.  104,  col. 
537-8)  ;  Act.  SS.  Bened.  iv.  108,  sq. ;  Gfrorer,  Chr.  K.  Bk.  iii.  p.  0^9. 

2  An  election  which  the  Council  \  reclaimed  (with  small  gift  of  prophecy) 
was  to  remain  fixed  and  stable.     Jaffe,  2nd  ed.  i.  394. 

3  Cf.  Ann.   Vedast.  s.a.  (P.  ii.  196.) 


DEATH  OF  CHARLES  THE  BALD.  441 

He  sent  back  messengers  to  France  to  urge  on  his  regents  and 
greater  vassals  the  dispatch  of  fresh  troops.  But  no  one 
moved  :  not  the  favourite  Boso,  not  Abbot  Hugh,  nor  the 
brave  Bernard,  Count  of  Auvergne,  nor  the  other  Bernard  of 
Gothia.1  At  the  approach  of  Carloman,  therefore,  Charles  had 
to  retreat  once  more,  to  make  for  the  nearest  passes  where  a 
more  inevitable  foe  was  lying  in  wait  for  him. 

The  King  of  Bavaria,  for  his  pnrt,  after  he  had  remained  a 
few  months  in  Lombardy,  was  struck  by  illness  ; 2  some  sinister 
effluence  from  that  soil  of  fevers.  It  ended  in  paralysis ;  and 
for  the  rest  of  his  days  that  handsome,  hopeful  prince  had  to 
sit  idly  at  his  country  seat  of  Otting  3  while  his  brother  Lewis 
despoiled  him  of  his  crown.  But  to  Charles  the  Italian 
journey  was  still  more  deadly.  Hurrying  back  over  Mont 
Cenis*  he  has  been  struck  down,  and  burns  and  shivers  in  his 
ague  fever.  Under  the  treatment  of  his  Jewish  doctor  he  grew 
rapidly  worse,  and  ended  his  life  in  a  chalet  in  the  valley  of  the 
Arc,  October  6,  877,  within  two  days  of  the  first  anniversa  ) 
of  his  great  defeat  at  Andernach.  Thus  upon  Lothair,  upon 
Charles,  upon  Carloman,  did  Italy  revenge  herself  on  the 
descendants  of  her  conqueror,  Charlemagne. 

Charles  the  Bald  was  not  old  when  he  died — not  more  than 
fifty-four.  But  what  changes  had  he  not  witnessed  in  the 
fortunes  and  in  the  spirit  of  the  Franks  since  the  day  when  we 
first  saw  him  by  the  knees  of  his  mother  at  the  festivities  ac- 
companying the  baptism  of  Harald;  or  since,  twelve  years  later, 
he  was  girt  with  a  sword  and  proclaimed  King  of  Neustria;  or 
even  since  the  partition  of  Verdun,  four-and- thirty  years  ago  ! 

1  Ann.  Bert.  a.  877. 

a  In  November,  Ann.  Fidd.  a.  877  ;  Muratori,  ii.  329 ;  Ann.  Bert. 
3  •  Odingas,'  Alten  Otting  near  the  Inn. 

*  Ann.  Bert.  (P.  i.  504).     Poisoned  by  his  Tew  doctor  according  to  Ann. 
Bert. 


442  THE  INVASION  OF  GERMANY. 

It  is  a  thought  to  make  one  pause.  Not  one  man  probably  in 
all  Lewis's  empire  would  have  dreamed  of  Frankland  vailing 
her  arms  before  the  countrymen  of  Harald  the  Dane ;  as  well 
might  you  talk  to  an  Englishman  to  day  of  England  being 
invaded  by  Dervishes  or  Zulus.  Yet  the  thing  had  come  to 
be.  It  had  been  a  long  reign  this  of  Charles  the  Bald,  the 
Imger  by  contrast  with  those  that  followed.  The  succeeding 
princes  of  this  house  were  destined  to  but  few  years  of  reign, 
few  and  evil ;  that  of  the  next  successor,  Lewis  the  Stammerer, 
lasted  but  one  year  and  six  months,  the  king  in  feeble  health 
all  the  time. 

II. 

Lewis  the  Stammerer  fulfilled  to  the  best  of  his  ability  those 
more  modest  duties  of  a  king  of  West  Francia,  which  his  father 
had  neglected  of  late.  As  for  the  Csesarship,  that  passed  away 
from  the  western  branch  of  the  Carling  House.  Carloman 
was  struck  down  before  he  could  enjoy  it.1  Pope  John 
thought  of  offering  it  to  Boso  rather  than  that  it  should 
pass  to  a  German.  But  it  did  in  the  end  fall  to  the  youngest 
of  the  three  German  princes,  Charles  of  Swabia,  whom  we  call 
Charles  the  Fat. 

In  the  earlier  months  of  878  we  find  Lewis  marching  to 
assist   Hugh  the  Abbot   against  the   Danes,    who  were  once 

a  -n  0-70     more  ravaging  freely  along  the  banks  of  the  Loire. 

But  in  this  expedition  the  king  fell  ill,  and  for  the 

brief  remainder  of  his  life  the  government  was  not  really  in  his 

hands,  but  in  those  of  his  greater  vassals,  of  whom  we  just  now 

enumerated  the  most  distinguished. 

More  and  more  confusing  grow  the  politics  of  these  days,  as 
each  country  yields   more  and  more  to  the  centrifugal  forces 

1  He  was  acknowledged  as  titular  emperor  by  his  partisans  in  Italy. 
Diimmler,  o.c.  ii.  99. 


LE  WIS  THE  STAMMERER.  443 

which  are  tearing  it  asunder.  Mediaeval  Europe  is  (we  have 
said  it  before)  in  reality  a  great  theocratic  republic  ;  an  aristo- 
cratic republic,  too,  no  doubt,  but  not  really  a  monarchy  or 
group  of  monarchies. 

Regarded  as  a  game  of  chess  merely,  one  may  take  some 
interest  in  the  movements  of  the  pieces.  A  game  of  chess  of 
a  new  kind ;  for  there  are  not  two  games  but  twenty,  each 
greater  piece,  almost,  constituting  a  party  of  its  own.  For 
royal  pieces  we  have  on  one  side  of  the  board  the  three  sons 
of  Lewis  the  German — of  whom  Carloman  must  now  be 
withdrawn.  On  the  other  side  of  it  we  have  Lewis  and 
Carloman,  the  two  sons  of  Lewis  the  Stammerer.  Queens 
are  not  wanting.  Engelberga,  the  proud  empress,  still  a  factor 
in  politics,  though  her  power  is  on  the  wane;  and  her 
daughter,  a  queen-to-be,  the  not  less  ambitious  Engeltrud, 
Boso's  wife.  For  knights  we  have  the  great  chiefs  of  Ger- 
many and  Saxony,  of  Franconia  and  the  East  Mark — Arnolf, 
Carloman's  natural  son,  with  a  separate  rule  in  Carinthia ; 
the  two  Ludolfings,  Bruno  and  Otto,  almost  as  independent 
in  Saxony ;  Count  Henry  of  Franconia :  all  famous  names, 
more  important  in  the  later  years  of  the  century  than  the  names 
of  kings.  In  the  west,  names  not  less  famous,  names  that  we 
know,  Hugo,  Boso,  Theodoric,  Conrad,  Count  of  Paris,  the 
two  Bernards ;  and  lastly  two  young  warriors  who  are  winning 
their  spurs,  Odo  and  Roberi,  the  sons  of  Robert  the  Strong. 

For  bishops  ?  The  great  ecclesiastics  of  the  mid-years  of 
the  century  were  now  dead  or  at  death's  door.  Pope  Nicholas 
was  dead ;  Hadrian,  his  successor,  who  with  lesser  powers  yet 
held  high  the  papal  dignity,  was  dead  too.  John  VIII.  was 
far  inferior  to  both  in  either  ability  or  character.  Raban  of 
Mainz,  the  greatest  of  scholars,  the  most  venerable  of  arch- 
bishops, had  been  dead  thirty  years.  Giinther  of  Cologne, 
Thietgaud  of  Metz — they  too  were  gone  after  playing  a  noisy 


444  THE  INVASION  OF  GERMANY. 

part  on  the  stage  of  life.  Hincmar  alone  remained,  and  he 
was  near  his  end.  But  still  his  interest  in  affairs  of  state,  and 
all  his  ancient  fire  were  not  extinct.  At  the  accession  of  Lewis 
the  Stammerer  he  had  addressed  an  exhortation  to  the  young 
king.1  And  for  a  rising  figure  we  have  Gozlin,  Abbot  of  St. 
Denis,  best  known  as  Gozlin  the  Bishop  of  Paris;2  with  him 
we  may  place  his  nephew  and  successor  in  the  abbacy, 
Ebolus. 


III. 

Lewis  the  Stammerer  did,  as  we  have  said,  nothing  more  that 

is  memorable  after  that  one  Danish  expedition  of 
A.D.  879. 

his,  and  he  died  April  10,  879,3  a  gentle,  just,  peace- 
loving  man,  at  least  in  these  later  years. 

At  the  beginning  of  the  new  reign — the  joint  reign  of  Lewis 
and  Carloman* —  a  portion  of  the  French  noblesse  made  a 
shameful  move.  Conrad  of  Paris  and  Abbot  Gozlin  sent  to 
offer  the  crown  to  the  German  prince,  Lewis  the  Saxon. 
Gozlin  had  been  Lewis's  prisoner  after  Andernach.  He  may 
have  been  favourably  impressed  by  the  German's  character. 
Conrad  again  had  blood  relationship  with  the  Carlings  on  both 
sides  of  the  Meuse;  that  may  have  been  the  excuse  for  his 
seeming  treachery.  But  Hugo  and  Boso  and  Theodoric  sup- 
ported the  cause  of  their  young  masters.  Lewis  the  Saxon, 
who  had  entered  France  with  an  army,  was  induced  to  come 
to  terms,  and,  instead  of  the  whole  kingdom,  to  content  himself 

x  Op.  Hincmari,  ap.  Migne,  t.  125,  col.  983  sqq.        2  See  Chapter  XV. 

3  Ann.  Ftild.  Apr.  11  ;  Ann.  Bert.  Apr.  10;  'Good  Friday  in  the 
evening'  (Hincmar).  Regino's  character  of  him  (which  may,  one  thinks, 
be  trusted),  is,  'a  simple  and  gentle  nature,  a  lover  of  peace,  of  justice,  of 
religion'  (Pertz,  i.  590). 

4  A  posthumous  child  was  born  to  Lewis's  widow — Charles,  known  in 
history  as  Charles  the  Simple. 


BOSO  KING  OF  BURGUNDY.  445 

with  western  Lotharingia.  Thus  Lothair's  kingdom  was  united 
in  a  way  precisely  the  reverse  of  that  which  had  been  the 
dream  of  Charles  the  Bald.  Instead  of  France  possessing 
itself  of  the  eastern  portion,  Germany  possessed  itself  of  the 
western. 

Boso's  access  of  zeal  on  behalf  of  his  young  masters  did  not 
last  long.  He  deemed  himself  too  great  to  be  a  subject. 
Charles,  according  to  one  account,  had  already  created  him  a 
titular  king  in  Lombardy,  'because,  like  the  emperors  of  old,  he 
would  have  kings  for  his  subjects.' x  John  VIII.  had,  we 
know,  thought  of  him  as  a  possible  emperor;  but  he  wisely 
narrowed  his  ambition  to  attainable  ends,  the  erection  of  his 
county  of  Cis-Jurane  Burgundy  into  a  kingdom.  In  the 
autumn  of  this  year  his  plans  were  ripe ;  and  accordingly,  on 
October  15,  there  met  an  assembly  of  bishops  and  archbishops 
at  Mantaille,  near  Vienne,  and  there  by  the  archbishops  of 
Vienne,  Lyons,  Tarantaise,  Aix  (les  Bains),  Aries,  and  Besan. 
9011  and  their  suffragans,  Boso  was  elected  king;2  even  the 
bishops  of  Macon,  Chalons  sur  Saone,  and  Autun  concurred. 
These  various  sees  united  constituted  a  large  territory — 
Provence  and  both  the  Burgundies — could  Boso  contrive  to 
hold  them  all.  He  could  not.  His  new-made  kingdom,  which 
went  sometimes  by  the  name  of  the  kingdom  of  Aries,  some- 
times of  kingdom  of  Burgundy,  was  limited  to  Provence  and 
Burgundy  west  of  the  Jura. 

This  was  a  great  event,  the  first  snatching  of  a  crown  from 
the  Calling  House.  3  And  it  was  not  likely  that  the  princes  of 
this  house  would  sit  down  calmly  under  the  affront.  They 
swore  eternal  hatred  to  the  usurper,  and  were  prepared,  it  seems, 

1  Regino,  a.  877  ;  he  says  Provence.  For  'king'  read  'duke';  for  '  Pro- 
vence '  read  '  Lombardy.' 

2  Pertz,  Leges,  i.  547  ;  Regino,  a.  879  (P.  i.  590). 

3  With  the  exception  of  Brittany,  which,  however,  as  so  independent 
always  and  l»ing  so  far  to  the  west,  was  a  much  less  crying  example. 


446  THE  INVASION  OF  GERMANY. 

to  make  an  end  of  him  by  any  means.1  Charles  of  Swabia, 
on  whose  borders  lay  the  new  kingdom,  joined  with  his 
cousins  in  this.  But,  says  our  chronicler,  Boso's  skill  and 
valour  triumphed  over  all  his  outward  enemies,  and  his  just 
rule  warded  off  treachery  at  home. 

In  the  south-west  the  French  princes  had  further  trouble 
with  Bernard  of  Gothia ;  and  over  in  Lorraine,  in.  the 
territories  of  Lewis  the  Saxon,  Hugo,  Lothair's  son,2  was  in 
revolt,  straining  every  nerve  to  win  for  himself  a  part  at  least 
of  the  territories  his  father  had  ruled.  Such  was  the  condition 
of  affairs  on  the  Continent  one  year  after  the  Treaty  of  Wedmore 
had  relieved  this  country  of  the  danger  of  Viking  conquest  and 
set  free  many  bands  of  adventurers  to  carry  their  depredations 
elsewhere. 

We  read  that  after  Wedmore  a  fresh  body  of  Vikings  came 
to  England  and  settled  at  Fu'ham.  Another  army,  consisting 
of  malcontent  Danes  who  would  not  accept  Christianity  or  the 
terms  of  Alfred's  and  Guthorm's  peace,  made  itself  a  camp  at 
Cirencester.  These  two  armies  eventually  united  ;  and  finding 
that  there  was  no  work  for  them  to  do  in  England,  they  set 
sail  and  crossed  over  to  Flanders.  Then  they  mounted  the 
Scheld.  A  forewarning  of  all  this  had  been  given  in  876  by  the 
appearance  of  a  new  Viking  fleet  in  the  Seine — a  warning  to 
which  Charles  had  remained  so  obstinately  blind.  Now  the 
full  fury  broke  loose  upon  the  fat  Flemish  lands  (Belgian  and 
French),  where  a  generation  had  grown  up  which  knew  not  the 
sight  of  the  ghastly  Viking  fires.  St.  Omer,  which  lies  in  the 
middle  of  the  long  strip  of  low  coast  between  the  Scheld  and 
the  Somme,  was  attacked  and  burned  on  July  28,  878.3     Just 

1  Regino,  I.e.  2  Natural  son,  by  Waldrada. 

3  Ann.  Blandienses,  s.a.  But  cf.  Dummler,  o.c.  ii.  130,  note.  It 
seems  more  reasonable  to  suppose  that  the  attack  on  St.  Omer  was  a  part  of 
the  proceedings  of  the  Fulham  Army. 


NEW  INVASION  OF  THE  CONTINENT.  447 

one  year  later  came  the  Fulham  army.1  They  laid  Therouanne 
in  ashes ;  then  crossing  the  Scheld  they  passed  into  Brabant. 
Hugo,  the  pretender  to  north  Lotharingia,  made  a  feint  of 
resisting  them,  and  undisturbed  they  mounted  the  Scheld  in 
their  boats  and  fell  upon  Ghent,  which  had  not  for  thirty  years 
felt  the  weight  of  their  heavy  hand.  At  Ghent  the  Vikings 
formed  a  winter  camp.  All  through  the  winter  months  they 
spread  harrying  and  burning  on  both  sides  of  the  river,  in 
Brabant  and  in  Flanders.2  In  the  spring  of  880  they  attacked 
Tournay. 

In  this  fresh  invasion  of  the  Continent,  as  we  may  call 
it,  Viking  leaders  new  and  old  come  to  the  front.  Strange 
that  the  two  most  important  names  now  before 

A.D.  880 

us  should  be  those  borne  by  the  two  Danish  kings 
who  first  emerge  out  of  the  mist  of  prehistoric  times,  and  first 
come  into  contact  with  the  Franks — Siegfred  and  Godfred.  It 
is  possible,  but  not  probable,  that  the  second  of  these  two  is  that 
son  of  Harald  who  was  baptized  along  with  his  father  in  a.d. 
826,  whom  subsequently  we  have  often  seen  marauding  on  the 
coasts  of  France.  Worm  is  the  name  of  a  third  leader. 
Hasting  was  still  alive,  but  he  remained  in  the  Loire  country. 
And  according  to  some  traditions  it  was  about  this  time  that  a 
new  leader  began  to  distinguish  himself,  one  who,  in  fame  and 
in  the  permanency  of  his  achievements,  was  to  surpass  all  the 
other  Viking  chiefs :  I  mean  Rolf,  the  future  founder  of 
Normandy.3 

No  one  now  thought  of  the  kings  of  Denmark ;  all  attention 
was  absorbed  by  the  new  nationality — as  we  may  call  it — of 
the  Vikings.  It  is  about  this  time  that  even  the  names  of  the 
kings  of   Denmark    drop  out  of   the  pages  of   the  Christian 


1  AS.  Chron.  2  Ann.  Vedast.     Ann.  Gand.  (Pertz.  ii.  187). 

3  Dudo,  De  act.  die.  Norm,  i.,  and  the  preface  to  M.  Lair's  edition. 


448  THE  INVASION  OF  GERMANY. 

chroniclers,  and  do  not  reappear  till  the  second  half  of  the 
Viking  Age,  while  we  meet  with  more  and  more  names  of  the 
Viking  leaders. 

After  the  conclusion  of  peace — the  Peace  of  Ribemont — 
between  Lewis  the  Saxon  and  his  cousins  the  West  Frank 
kings,  the  former  made  seiious  preparations  for  meeting  the 
Danish  inroad  in  the  north.  For  on  him  fell,  now  that  he 
had  acquired  the  whole  of  Lotharingia,  the  duty  of  defend- 
ing all  the  coast-line  north  of  the  Scheld.  The  Vikings  at  the 
moment  lay  upon  the  borders  of  both  kingdoms,  ravaging 
impartially  in  each.  The  German  king,  marching  through  the 
territory  between  the  Meuse  and  the  Scheld,  came  upon  a 
large  body  of  the  plunderers  under  the  command  of  Godfred.1 
The  king  at  once  gave  the  signal  to  attack;  and,  by  the 
superior  weight  of  the  German  troops,  the  Danes  were  borne 
down  and  almost  cut  to  pieces.2  This  was  a  hopeful  issue  to 
the  first  attack  which  for  some  while  Christians  had  ventured 
in  the  open  field  against  their  oppressors.  But,  unhappily, 
Lewis's  natural  son,  Hugo,  a  well-loved  son,  riding  impetuously 
at  the  head  of  his  troop,  was  wounded  and  carried  off  by  the 
remn.int  of  Godfred;s  force,  who  shut  themselves  in  a  royal  vill, 
or  farm,  at  Thuin  on  the  Sambre. 

The  Germans  might  easily  have  surrounded  and  annihilated 
this  small  force;  and  such  a  disaster,  involving  the  life  of  their 
greatest  leader,  would  have  been  full  of  discouragement  for  the 
late-returned  Danes.  But  the  thought  of  the  danger  in  which 
lay  his  dear  Hugo  held  Lewis  back.  So  he  sat  idly  through 
the  night,  watching  the  Danish  camp-fires,  till  the  dawn  of 
morning  should  give  him  a  chance  of  parleying.  But  in 
reality  those  lights  are  not  the  camp  fires  of  the  Danes  :  they 

1  Regino,  a.  779,  '  In  silva  Carbonaria' — in  the  Kohlenwald. 
9  Five  thousand  fell  according  to  Ann.  tuld.  s.a.  880. 


DEA  TH  OF  DUKE  BRUNO.  449 

are  the  funeral-fires  of  the  slain — five  thousand  of  these,  it  is 
said.  And  Hugo's  body,  that,  too,  lies  there  stretched  upon 
the  ground  looking  starward,  but  with  eyes  that  do  not  see — 
no  ransom  more  needed  for  him.  The  enemy  themselves  have 
stolen  off  during  the  night  and  made  their  way  to  their  fleet, 
and  when  Lewis  arrives  at  the  camp  there  will  be  nothing  to 
be  found  but  dying  fires  and  the  body  of  his  son  among  other 
slain.1 

Whatever  prestige  the  Germans  may  have  gained  by  this 
victory,  the  victory  itself  was  not  an  important  one;  and  it 
was  more  than  counterbalanced  by  a  fearful  defeat  which 
almost  at  the  same  time  the  Saxons  suffered  at  the  hands  of 
another  body  of  Danish  invaders.  At  the  end  of  January,  880, 
a  Viking  fleet  sailed  up  the  Elbe.2  Thereupon  Duke  Bruno, 
on  whose  hands  lay  the  protection  of  the  Danish  mark, 
gathered  a  Saxon  army  and  marched  against  the  invaders. 
The  armies  met  upon  that  great  sterile  plain  which  lies 
between  Hamburg  and  Hanover,  and  is  known  as  the  Liineburg 
Heath.  Small  chance  for  the  losing  side  to  find  shelter  any- 
where on  this  open  plain.  And  so  it  fell  out ;  for  the  Saxon 
army  was  not  only  defeated,  but  absolutely  cut  to  pieces.^ 
Among  the  slain  was  Bruno  himself,  the  head  of  that  famous 
house  of  Ludolfings,  rich  in  great  men.  Bruno  dead,  his 
brother  Otto  became  Duke  of  Saxony. 

Worse  and  worse  grew  the  condition  of  the  lands  bordering 
on  the  North  Sea  and  the  English  Channel.  The  plunderers 
came  up  the  Waal  as  far  as  Xanten,  a  place  which  they  had 
not  visited  for  twenty  years ;  they  passed  beyond  Xanten  to 
Nymuegen.4     In  Ghent,  Abbot  Gozlin  gained  a  victory  over 

1  Regino  ;  Ann.  Ved.  880.  a  Ann.  Fuld.  880. 

3  A.  Fuld.,  ibid.,  give  a  long  list  of  the  slain. 

4  Regino,  881  ;  Ann.  Fuld.,  880.    Diimmler  o.c.  ascribes  these  events  to 
the  year  S79,  Sternstrup  o.c.  to  S80. 

30 


450  THE  INVASION  OF  GERMANY. 

them.     But  another  troop  mounted  to  Cambray1  and  ravaged 

far  and  near.     Amc  g  the  piaces  which  they  plundered  was 

St.  Bertin,2  whose  chronicles  we  use.     By  the  end 
A  D  881 

of  the  spring  of  88 1  they  had  almost  swept  bare 

the  country  between  the  Scheld  and  the  Somme.  Accordingly 
in  the  summer  of  that  year,  July,  they  crossed  the  river  and 
spread  their  devastations  further  south.  It  was  a  veritable 
invasion,  and  almost  of  a  Tartar  kind,  like  the  devastations  of 
a  horde  of  Huns.  However,  Lewis,  the  elder  of  the  two  kings 
who  governed  France,  had  now  collected  an  army  and  was 
marching  forward  to  encounter  the  enemy,  accompanied  by 
what  anxious  thoughts  and  prayers  on  behalf  of  his  subjects 
we  can  imagine;  Christendom  and  civilization  themselves  might 
seem  to  hang  trembling  in  the  balance.  The  Danes  had 
pressed  forward  as  far  as  Beauvais.  Lewis  on  his  side  crossed 
the  Oise  not  far  from  Abbeville,  hoping  to  intercept  the 
Viking  army  as  it  returned  to  the  ford  of  the  Somme.3  The 
Danes  soon  came  in  sight ;  and  at  Saucourt,*  between  Abbe- 
ville and  Eu,  the  two  armies  joined  battle.  Lewis,  at  the  head 
of  his  horse,  charged  the  ranks  of  the  Northmen,  who  gave 
way,  broke  and  fled  .towards  Saucourt ;  all  but  a  fragment  of 
their  army  which  still  held  firm.  And  as  the  Franks  scattered 
to  plunder,  these  Danes  assumed  the  offensive,  and  the  Franks 
in  their  turn  began  to  fall  back.  But  the  French  king  rallied 
his  troops,  charged  once  more,  and  broke  this  remnant  of  the 
opposing  force. 

This  was  a  better  feat  of  arms  than  any  which  Charles  the 
Bald  could  boast  of  against  the  same  foes.  No  wonder,  there- 
fore, that  the  fame  of  Lewis  spread  far  beyond  his  own 
country,  that  his  victory  was  chronicled  in   England,  and  that 

1  Ann.  Vedast.,  88o.  2  Ibid.  a.  8Si  (December,  88o). 

3  At  '  Latverum  '  (  =  Laviers),  Vedast. 

4  '  Sathulcurtis,'  Ibid. 


THE  BATTLE  OF  SAUCOURT  451 

they  sang  of  it  in  the  native  German  tongue  by  the  banks  of 
the  Rhine.1  Eight  or  nine  thousand  Norsemen  it  is  said  fell 
at  the  battle  of  Saucourt.2 

There  had  been  of  late  so  few  successes  to  boast  of  against 
the  Vikings  !  This  victory  checked  for  a  moment  the  advance 
of  the  invaders  in  the  western  kingdom ;  thereby  it  only  went 
the  worse  for  the  eastern  one.  Now,  in  fact,  began  the  worst 
invasion  from  the  Northmen  which  the  lands  governed  by 
Lewis  the  Saxon  had  ever  suffered  or  would  suffer.  The 
Northmen  had  chosen  their  time  well.  Lewis  was  ill ;  much 
more  so  than  men  guessed  as  yet.  He  had  done  little  since 
his  Thuim  victory  and  the  loss  of  his  son  Hugo.  Carloman, 
the  eldest  brother,  had  died  two  years  previously,  after  his  long 
enforced  faincance  at  his  farm  of  Otting.  There  had  he  built 
a  church  and  founded  an  abbey,  and  there  were  his  bones  now 
laid.3  Lewis  succeeded  him  in  Bavaria  and  the  Ostmark; 
Charles  of  Swabia  went  over  to  Italy  to  claim  the  kingdom  of 
that  country  and  the  imperial  crown  :  he  had  no  thoughts  just 
now  to  give  to  the  troubles  in  the  north.  Arnulf,  Carloman's 
only  but  illegitimate  son,  was  capable  of  great  things  and  had 
a  great  destiny.  But  at  present  he  had  to  look  on  and  see  his 
uncles  dividing  between  them  his  father's  realms  Nominally 
he  became  a  vassal  of  Lewis ;  in  reality  he  ruled  almost  in- 
dependently in  Carinthia.s  In  Thuringia  there  were  disputes 
between  rival  vassals,  going  to  the  length  of  open  war.  Saxony 
had  lost  one  of  its  great  chiefs  in  Bruno.  And  Hugo,  the  son 
of  Lothair,  was  only  waiting  the  opportunity  to  make  good,  by 
any  means  in  his  power,  his  claims  on  Lower  Lorraine.  This 
was  the  moment  at  which    the  Viking    leaders,  Siegfred  and 

1  The  Ludtvigslied,  so  called.  '  Rithmus  Teutonicus  de  pice  memoria: 
Ludovico  rege.'  See  Miillenhofif  and  Scherer,  Deut.  Poesie  u.  Prosa,  pp. 
17-19.     See  also  Sym.  Dun.  and  Asser,  s.a. 

2  Regino,  8,000  ;  Ann.  Ftild. ,  9,000. 

3  Regino,  880.  *  Ibid.  s  Ibid. 


4$2  THE  INVASION  OF  GERMANY. 

Godfred,    assembled    their   forces   for   a    great    invasion    of 
Germany. 

IV. 

The  Vikings  began  by  a  widespread  plundering  over  all  the 
country  of  the  Lower  Rhine.1     After  that  they  set  out  upon 

a  tj  8ri  tne*r  marcn  inland.  Nobody  was  there  to  collect 
or  take  the  command  of  an  opposing  army,  and, 
the  people  fleeing  out  of  their  way  as  best  they  might, 
the  Danes  pressed  on  unhindered  to  Cologne,  the  metropolis 
of  Lower  Germany,  almost  the  most  important  archbishopric 
north  of  the  Alps.  The  greater  part  of  the  town  the 
Vikings  destroyed,  and  reduced  its  churches  to  ruins.  Then 
forward  to  Bonn,  which  experienced  the  fate  of  Cologne. 
Zulpich,  Julich,  Neuss,  fell  at  the  same  time.  It  might 
seem  that  this  region  which  had  witnessed  the  consoli- 
dation of  the  Frankish  Empire  was  destined  now  to  witness 
its  entire  overthrow.  Worst  of  all  they  attacked  and  took 
imperial  Aix  itself.  Now  was  fulfilled  the  threat  of  old  God- 
fred the  Danish  king,  against  Charlemagne,  that  a  Danish 
army  should  be  seen  within  his  capital;  fulfilled  by  another 
Godfred,  possibly  his  descendant.  Old  Godfred  had  never 
dreamt  of  such  an  easy  victory  as  these  Vikings  were  gaining, 
of  so  truculent  an  entry  into  the  Capital  of  the  Empire.  The 
Northmen  stalled  their  horses  in  the  aisles  of  the  churches 
which  Charlemagne  had  built,  and  they  plundered  and  in  part 
burned  the  palace  of  the  great  emperor.  From  Aix  the  army 
passed  on  to  the  Abbey  of  Cornelimunster,  and  thence  made 
their  way  into  the  beautiful  Eifel  country— that  fair  Devonian 
land — which  was  then  no  doubt  very  thinly  inhabited.     In  the 

1  For  the  account  which  follows  see  Regino  (Pertz,  i.  592-596),  and 
Ann.  Fuld.     (P.  i.  396-397.) 


GOD  FRED'S  ARMY  ON  THE  LOWER  RHINE.    453 

midst  of  that  almost   desert    a  bygone  Carling  prince1    had 

established     the    Abbey    of    Priim,    which    amid    its    matted 

brambles  2  lay  hidden  from  the  world ;  yet  not  so  hidden  but 

that  the  Vikings  could  find  it.     It  is  a  place  much  associated 

with  the  history  of   the  Carling  House      The  great  Charles 

had  loved  it  and    freely  endowed  it.     Charles  the  Bald  had 

been  confined  there  when  a  boy,  by  the  orders  of  his  brother 

Lothair;  and  thither  Lothair  himself  had  gone  to  die  when 

he  laid  down  the  imperial  sceptre.     It  still  awaited   a   third 

scion  of  the  house  to   end  his  days  in  blind   imprisonment 

within  its  walls;  but    at    the    moment   he   was  watching,  not 

altogether  with  discontent,  the  successes  of  the  Danes. 

The  Vikings  did  not  reach  Priim  until  after  the  beginning 

of  the  new  year,  that  is  to  say,  on  Twelfth  Day,  a.d.  882.3   This 

day  was  without  question  a  heathen  festival.     At 

AD    882 
Priim  they  stayed  three  days,  keeping  we  need  not 

doubt  high  wassail.     And   this  marked   the  farthest  period  of 

their  advance  in  this  expedition.     For  they  now  returned  to  a 

camp  which  they  had  made  and  fortified  the  year  previous  at 

Ashloh  or  Elsloo,*  a  royal  villa  near  Maestricht. 

Terrible  had  been  the  doings  of  the  heathen  ;  and  they  were 

answered  by  signs  not  less  terrible  in  earth  and  hea\en      An 

earthquake  shook  men's  very  souls ;  5  in  the  January  of  this 

year  a  comet  rose   flaming  into  Jhe  night,6  and  at  the  same 

time,?  the  life  ebbed  away  from  Lewis  of  Germany,  who  had 

long  been  lying  ill  and  incapacitated  at  Frankfurt. 

Now  Charles  the  emperor,  once  Charles  of  Swabia,  was  the 

1  Pippin  the  Short. 

9  See  Forstemann  Altdeutsches  Namtnhuch  (Ortsnamen),  s.  v.  Priim. 

3  Regino,  a.  882.  *  '  Ahslona  '  Regino  ;   '  Haslao,'  Vedast. 

5  This  was  at  Mainz  '  before  cockcrow.'     A.  luld.  (Pertz,  i.  394.) 

6  Ibid.  p.  395. 

1  Most  probably  :  Fuld.  20  Jan.  ;  Regino  20  Aug.  ;  but  see  Dummler 
Ostfr.  Reich.  \\.  163,  note  37, 


454  THE  INVASION  OF  GERMANY. 

inheritor  of  a  vast  domain.  All  the  countries  which,  in  former 
years,  had  been  ruled  by  the  three  monarchs — Lewis  the  Ger- 
man, Lothair  the  Second,  and  Lewis  the  Emperor — were  united 
under  his  sceptre.1  He  did  indeed  promise  to  restore  to  his 
cousin  the  portion  of  Lorraine  which  had  been  ceded  by  the 
treaty  of  Ribemont ;  but  he  never  fulfilled  his  promise.  All 
these  vast  domains  were  nominally  Charles's.  But  he  wa^  too 
weak  to  rule  in  them,  or  if  he  ruled  to  govern.  In  bad  health, 
not  unamiable,  and  beloved  by  many  of  his  poorer  subjects,2 
he  was  yet  not  the  man  for  these  disjointed  times. 

Very  soon  the  Northmen  began  again  to  advance  up  the 
Rhine.  They  were  met  by  the  jo)ful  news  of  Lewis's  death. 
Charles  was  in  Italy,  and  Germany  for  the  time  without  a  ruler. 
Now  was  an  opportunity  for  the  Vikings  to  penetrate  into  the 
vine-lands  which  lay  above  the  Mosel.  The  finest  towns  of 
Germany,  the  richest  cathedrals  and  abbeys  lay  upon  the  stream 
up  which  their  ships  were  sailing.  If  their  leader  Godfred  really 
was — as  some  have  supposed — the  same  asthe  Godfred,  Harald's 
son,3  he  might  remember  through  the  dim  vista  of  years  another 
occasion  on  which  he  had  sailed  in  a  white-winged  Danish  ship 
up  the  same  reaches;  passed  Confluentes  or  Coblenz,  where  met 
the  streams  of  Rhine  and  Mosel,  past  the  Pfalzinsel  where 
Lewis  the  Pious  was  carried  to  draw  his  last  breath,  through 
the  narrow  neck  of  river  where  the  Lurlei  rock  mirrors  itself 
in  the  swift  stream,  and  up  the  broader  reaches  of  the  rich 
Rhinegau,  as  far  as  lordly  Mainz.  Now  in  a  very  different 
guise  from  that  of  humble,  white-robed  catechumens,  and  with 
fire  and  famine  as  their  handmaids,  he  and  his  Danes  set  out 

1  Or  say  simply  the  territories  of  Lothair  the  Elder  and  Lewis  the  Ger- 
man ;  save  that  Lothair  was  only  nominally  King  of  Italy. 

2  They  pitied  him  in  his  fall,  and  afterwards  invented  a  myth  that  he  had 
not  really  died  at  the  time  supposed,  but  would  come  again  an  1  reign  over 
them. 

3  An  extremely  improbable  supposition  of  course, 


THE  SIEGE  OF  ASHLOH.  455 

upon  the  same  journey.  Hie  people,  sheep  without  shepherds, 
offered  slight  resistance.  We  have  no  details  of  this  invasion. 
Those  children  of  chaos,  wherever  they  went,  surrounded  them- 
selves with  a  cloud  of  darkness  ;  for  all  that  had  any  semblance 
of  civilization  fled  at  their  approach.  All  the  land  between 
the  Meuse  and  the  Rhine,  at  any  rate  from  Coblenz  down- 
wards, was  in  their  hinds,  and  it  was  passing  more  and  more 
under  the  sceptre  of  Chaos  and  Old  Night.  And  this  was  the 
region  in  which  had  been  planted  the  germ  of  the  mighty 
empire  of  the  Franks.  So  far  backwards  had  the  Northmen 
contrived  to  roll  the  car  of  history.  All  of  the  Christians 
who  could  get  there  sheltered  themselves  within  the  walls  of 
Mainz.  Fortunately  the  invaders  never  got  so  far  as  this  town. 
From  Coblenz  they  turned  up  the  Mosel  and  burnt  Treves. 

As  the  Danes  were  thinking  of  returning  to  their  strong  camp 
at  Ashloh,  the  news  reached  them,  and  passed  along  all  good 
Christian  lips,  that  the  new  emperor,  Charles,  had  come  again 
across  the  Alps  ;  that  he  had  held  a  diet  at  Worms,1  and  there 
had  summoned  contingents  from  every  part  of  the  empire.  He 
was  forming  a  great  army,  with  which  he  was  about  to  make  a 
strenuous  effort  to  rid  Germany  for  ever  from  the  Viking 
scourge. 

And  it  was  a  huge  army  which  now  assembled  under  the 
banner  of  Charks.2  From  Iialy  he  had  brought  a  body  of 
Lombards,  who  were  in  this  wise  once  again  to  revisit  the 
neighbourhood  of  their  own  ancestral  home,  and  once  more  to 
fight  shoulder  to  shoulder  with  their  ancient  kinsmen,  the 
Saxons.  Contingents  from  all  the  German  nationalities  were 
with  Charles's  colours ;  his  own  Swabians  ;  Bavarians  under 
the  leadership  of  Arnulf;  East  Fianks  under  Duke  Henry; 
Thuringians,  Saxons,  Frisians — who  can  count  them  all?      A 

1  Ann.  Fuld.  a.  882.  2  Regino,  a.  882. 


456  THE  INVASION  OF  GERMANY. 

formidable  host,  had  it  been  commanded  by  a  man  :  if  Arnulf, 
for  example,  instead  of  being  second  in  command,  could  have 
been  first. 

But  Siegfred  and  Godfred  stood  manfully  to  their  arms  ; 
good  scouts  in  front,  and  the  strong  place  at  Elsloo  in  their 
rear.  Time  alone  could  show  whose  confidence  was  the  better 
placed.  At  Andernach,  a  place  of  good  omen  for  German 
hearts,  the  imperial  army  made  a  momentary  halt ;  two  corps 
from  out  of  it,  Arnulf' s  Bavarians,  Henry  and  his  Franks,  were 
sent  forward  by  rapid  marches  to  overtake,  if  possible,  the 
Northmen  before  they  reached  their  stronghold.  But  the 
Vikings — by  treachery  say  the  chroniclers  :  by  the  excellence 
of  their  intelligence  department  say  we — were  warned  of  the 
danger  and  made  good  their  retreat. 

Presently  Charles  with  the  main  army  came  up  to  the  Danish 
camp,  and  the  siege  of  Ashloh  began  about  the  middle  of  July, 
882.  It  had  endured  a  week  or  so  when  there  fell  a  hail- 
storm  of  extraordinary  violence  with  stones  as  big  as  cricket- 
balls,  if  we  are  to  believe  what  the  chroniclers  tell  us.1  The 
timid  Christians,  grown  superstitious  through  their  fears,  saw 
them,  no  doubt,  increased  to  ten  times  their  real  dimensions  ; 
and,  having  learnt  to  tremble  at  everything,  thought  they 
discerned  the  hand  of  God  directed  against  themselves.  We 
will  hope  that  it  was  only  the  baser  spirits  in  the  army  of 
Charles  who  thus  trembled.2  In  reality  the  storm  had  done 
more  harm  to  the  defenders  than  to  the  attacking  party;  for  part 
of  the  walls  of  the  Danish  camp  were  knocked  down.  But, 
unfortunately  in  the  number  of  this  baser  sort  was  the  emperor 
himself;  and  he  at  last,  by  the  persuasion  of  two  traitorous 
councillors^  was  induced  to  open  negotiations  with  Siegfred 

1  They  could  not  be  spanned  by  the  thumb  and  finger.  Diimmler,  o.c, 
ii.  203. 

*  Regino,  U.  3  Jm.  fuld,  882. 


MASSACRE  OF  THE  CHRISTIANS.  457 

and   Godfred.      Finally,    Charles  promised   an    immense   in- 
demnity to  the  Danes  if  they  would  retire  from  his  territories. 

Great  must  have  been  the  joy  in  every  Viking  heart  in 
Ashloh,  and  fine  the  contempt  of  the  Danes  for  the  Christians 
when  these  conditions  of  peace  were  made  known.  For  in 
fact  the  Northmen  had  been  reduced  to  their  last  extremity 
even  during  these  few  days  of  siege,  owing  to  their  want  of 
time  or  of  foresight  to  lay  in  a  stock  of  provisions.  This  was 
a  second  and  more  disastrous  siege  of  Oissil ;  without  the  ex- 
cuse which  Charles  the  Bald  had  had  for  letting  the  Danes  go 
scot  free.  As  if  this  humiliation  of  their  adversaries  were  not 
enough,  the  Danes  now  gave  one  more  proof  of  their  insolence 
and  barbarity.  Placing  a  shield  over  their  walls  (which  was 
their  token  of  peace  *)  they  threw  open  the  gates  of  their 
fortified  camp  to  all  comers.  People  of  every  description 
flocked  into  the  town ;  some  to  admire  the  wonderful  build  and 
equipment  of  these  heathens,  some  to  chaffer  for  the  treasures 
which  they  had  to  sell.  We  can  fancy  the  sutlers  passing 
in  and  out  among  the  tents,  of  whom  no  small  proportion  were 
doubtless  Jews,  bargaining  for  jewels,  precious  relics,  books, 
and  crucifixes,  which  had  been  robbed  from  half  the  churches 
and  abbe\s  in  the  Rhineland  ;  offering  in  their  turn  arms  and 
armour,  gold  and  silver  ornaments,  and  dresses  of  silk  and  fine 
linen.  But  while  all  this  was  proceeding,  of  a  sudden  the 
shield  was  taken  down,  the  gates  were  shut ;  then  the  Vikings 
fell  upon  the  defenceless  crowd  within  their  walls  and  made  a 
massacre  of  the  Christians  :  a  Wonderful  picture  of  the  ferocity 
of  the  Northmen.  And  a  not  less  striking  example  was  it  of 
the  pusillanimity  of  Charles,  that  he  did  not  at  once  break  off 
all  negotiations  with  these  barbarians  and  begin  the  siege  on<"e 
more  at  whatever  disadvantage.    On  the  contrary,  he  chose  only 

1  Ann,  Full.  882, 


458  THE  INVASION  OF  GERMANY. 

to  look  the  other  way ;  not  to  see  the  crime  which  had  been 
perpetrated  before  his  eyes,  and  to  fulfil  the  conditions  of  the 
treaty  as  if  nothing  had  happened.  These  conditions  involved 
ihe  payment  of  an  immense  sum,  2,400  or  2,800  pounds  of 
silver  and  gold,  or  48,000  solidi.  The  solidus  here  spoken  of 
is  not  a  piece  of  coined  money,  only  the  solidus  of  account.  It 
is  impossible  to  make  an  accurate  comparison  between  values 
in  those  days  and  values  at  the  present  day.  But  it  would  be 
safe  at  any  rate  to  reckon  these  48,000  solidi  as  not  less  than 
p£i  20,000  sterling. 

But  this  was  not  all  that  Charles  surrendered.  On  condition 
of  Godfred  embracing  the  Christian  religion,  which  he  declared 
his  willingness  to  do,  he  received  the  grant  of  an  immense 
territory  on  the  Rhine  and  the  Waal.  And  presently  he 
married  a  scion  of  the  Carling  House,  Gisla  x  or  Gisella,  sister  of 
Hugh  of  Lorraine  (so  we  may  call  him),  and  therefore  a 
natural  daughter  of  Lothair  II.  The  Danes  who  did  not 
choose  to  settle  down  under  Godfred — a  settlement  almost 
comparable  to  that  of  Guthorm-^Ethelst  in  in  our  country — 
took  their  share  of  the  48,000  solidi  and  consented  to  abandon 
for  the  nonce  the  territories  of  Charles  the  Emperor. 

It  was  &  treaty  to  make  angels  weep.  Well  might  men 
draw  a  contrast  between  the  conduct  of  Charles,  with  all  the 
vast  resources  of  the  empire  at  his  back,  and  that  of  Lewis  of 
France  with  his  little  band  of  Franks  at  Saucourt. 

V. 

It  would  be  no  wonder  if  a  movement  had  been  made  in 
Germany  for  deposing  Charles  and  putting  his  nephew  Lewis 
in  his  place.     Perhaps  the  Ludwigslied  was  written  about  this 

1  Arnolf  likewise  had  a  sister  Gisella;  another  Gisella  married  (or  did 
not  marry)  Rolf  of  Normandy.  Gisl  in  Old  Norse  is  a  hostage ;  so  we 
cannot  be  sure  that  all  these  are  proper  names. 


DEATH  OF  LEWIS  OF  FRANCE.  459 

time  with  the  object  of  exciting  enthusiasm  for  the  scheme. 
But,  as  ill-fortune  would  have  it,  Lewis  himself  put  an  end  to 
all  such  hopes.  Th;s  young  prince  in  the  prosecution  of  a  love- 
affair,  and  a  little  the  worse  for  liquor,  as  we  may  surmise, 
pursued  a  reluctant  damsel  who  fled  before  him  to  her  father's 
house.  Lewis  was  on  horseback  ;  and  either  unable  to  stop 
his  horse,  or  forgetting  to  stoop  sufficiently,  his  shoulder  struck 
against  the  archway  of  the  court-yard  \  whereby  he  received 
such  injuries  that  he  died  shortly  afterwards.1 

Now,  therefore,  young  Carloman  was  left  alone  upon  the 
throne  of  France,  a  mere  boy,  in  indifferent  health,  without 
prestige  or  power.  What  was  there  for  him  to  do  but,  as  he 
himself  said,  to  look  up  to  Abbot  Hugh  as  to  a  father?2  It 
would  appear  as  if  the  race  of  Charlemagne  were  becoming 
exhausted,  when  we  see,  as  we  do,  the  whole  of  his  empire 
divided  between  there  two  rulers,  Carloman  and  Charles  the 
Fat,  the  weak  in  body  and  the  weak  in  mind. 3 

The  difficulties  which  beset  these  two  princes  did  not  in  the 
meantime  grow  less.  It  may  have  seemed  a  gain  to  have  got 
the  terrible  Godfred  turned  into  a  Christian,  married  to  a 
Christian  wife,  and  settled  where  he  could  (if  he  would)  defend 
the  interior  of  the  empire  against  fresh  Northern  invasions. 
But  then  we  must  remember  who  Godfred's  wife  was  •  sister 
to  none  other  than  the  '  tyrant '  Hugo  who  was  willing  to  sacri- 
fice every  principle  of  duty  to  win  back  his  father's  kingdom  of 
Lorraine.  One  of  the  typical  '  bastards  '  of  romance,  in  truth, 
was  this  Hugo.  He  was  getting  more  and  more  violent  in  his 
ways,  executing  on  the  slightest  suspicion  some  of  his  oldest 
and  most  faithful  servants. ♦ 

1  Ann.  Vedast.  (P.  ii.  199).  a  Cf.  Bouquet,  ix.  431  and  435. 

3  There  was  another  West  Frank  prince,  a  posthumous  son  of  Lewis  the 
Stammerer,  and  then  quite  an  infant.  He  afterwards  came  to  the  throne, 
and  is  known  in  history  as  Charles  the  Simple. 

♦  Regino,  s.a.  883  (P.  i.  593-4). 


460  THE  INVASION  OF  GERMANY. 

The  Western  Kingdom  was  in  its  turn,  obviously  exposed  to 
fresh  dangers  by  the  conclusion  of  peace  at  Elsloo.  The 
victory  of  Saucourt  bad  thrown  the  Vikings  upon  Germany  ; 
the  conclusion  of  peace  with  the  emperor,  coinciding  with  the 
death  of  Lewis,  invited  a  large  number  back  to  France.  This 
contingent  departed  under  the  command  of  Siegfred,  and  many 
districts  of  France  which  had  been  long  free  from  attack 
groaned  again  under  the  cruelties  of  the  invaders.  Each 
month  the  Northmen  grew  bolder,  and  advanced  their  lines 
nearer  to  the  centre  of  France.  After  leaving  the  Meuse, 
which  now  lay  within  Charles's  territory,  they  betook  them- 
selves to  the  Scheld,  the  border  river,  and  sailed  up  that  stream 
to  Conde,  where  for  a  while  they  had  their  headquarters. 
Abbot  Hugh  had  gone  off  to  confer  with  the  emperor  at 
Worms,  and  the  knowledge  of  his  absence  made  the  Vikings 
more  bold.  From  Conde  they  pressed  on  through  the  forest 
of  Thierache,1  a  wild  forest  in  tho^e  days,  stretching  from 
Scheld  to  the  Meuse.  When  they  emerged  i hence  the  Danes 
found  themselves  in  a  new  country.  They  marched  upon 
Laon,  where  the  Vikings  had  never  before  been  seen.  This 
citadel  upon  the  rock,  a  favourite  seat  of  the  West  Frank 
Carlings,  stood  out  of  their  reach.  But  not  so  Rheims  hard 
by;  and  there  the  town  walls,  dismantled  by  Ebbo  long  years 
ago,  had  never  been  restored.  Hincmar,  grown  very  old,  still 
watched  over  his  charge.  But  with  the  city  and  its  inestimable 
relics  left  so  defenceless,  Hincmar,  weak  and  old  as  he  was — 
vecchio e tardo,  'old  and  slow,'  as  Dante  says— had  to  flee  away 
by  night,  carrying  the  relics  with  him. 

The  Northmen  rode  right  up  to  the  town  ;  but  for  some 
unexplained  reason — which  contemporary  writers  have  no 
difficulty  in  recognizing  as  the  special  intervention  of  Provi- 

1  Ann.  Vedast.  (P.  ii.  200). 


FLIGHT  AND  DEA  TH  OF  H  INC  MAR.  461 

dence — they  did  not  penetrate  within  the  walls.  Perhaps  the 
very  defencelessness  of  the  place  made  them  suspect  an 
ambush.  About  this  time,  moreover,  Carloman,  who,  with 
Abbot  Hugh,  had  marched  up  to  bar  their  further  pro- 
gress, encountered  portions  of  the  Viking  army  and  gained 
two  victories  over  them.1  Very  soon  after  this  flight  from 
Rheims,  and  no  doubt  as  a  result  of  it,  Hincmar  died.2 
His  hand  seems  almost  to  the  last  moment  to  have  been 
holding  the  pen  which  he  wielded  with  such  power;  for  his 
Annals  of  St.  Be7'tin  carry  us  on  to  the  summer  of  a.d.  882. 
He  had  been  Archbishop  of  Rheims  since  a.d.  845;  two  years, 
that  is  to  say,  after  the  Peace  of  Verdun.  But  he  had  taken 
some  part  in  public  affairs  much  earlier.  For  it  was  through 
his  intercession  with  Lewis  the  Pious  that  Hildwin,  Abbot  of 
St.  Denis,  was  restored  to  favour  in  a.d.  834.  He  had  certainly 
been  a  witness  of  a  wonderful — even  a  miraculous  — decay  in 
the  empire  and  in  the  Carling  name.  It  is  an  undoubted  fact 
that  at  this  juncture  men  were  seriously  disquieted  by  the  fear 
of  a  complete  heathen  conquest  of  the  empire,  German  and 
French,  north  of  the  Alps.  Then,  if  the  Saracens  had  pushed 
forward  from  the  south,  might  there  not  have  ensued  what 
would  have  been  tantamount  to  a  second  fall  of  the  Roman 
Empire?  Anarchy  was  spreading  like  a  mildew  ;  from  without 
first,  but  now  from  within.  Open  robbery  prevailed  on  every 
side :  Chri-tians  were  abandoning  Christianity  here,  as  the 
Gaill-Gaedhil  were  doing  over  in  Ireland,  and  joining  the 
ferocious  Northmen.  Many  saw  in  all  this  a  forewarning  of 
the  end  of  the  world.  Could  peace  be  found  upon  the  earth  ? 
Look  south,  where  Duke  Boso,  or  King  Boso,  was  still  main- 
taining   himself  by  arms  against  the  power  of  France,  and 

x  Ann,  Vedast.  (P.  ii.  200).  One  in  the  wood  of  Vicogne  preceded  the 
attack  on  Laon  ;  one  at  Avaux  sur  Aisne  followed  it.  Cf.  Chron.  A'e//iense, 
882.  2  Ibid.,  Dec.  21,  882. 


462  THE  INVASION  OF  GERMANY. 

draining  away  in  this  war  the  sinews  of  the  kingdom.  Nowhere 
did  the  danger  to  Christendom  restrain  the  feuds  or  the  ambi- 
tions of  the  great  vassals.  In  Germany  there  was  a  Count 
Poppo,  of  Thuringia,  at  war  with  a  Francian,  Count  Egino  ; x 
there  was  Count  Aribo  in  the  Eastmark,  whose  rule  was  dis- 
puted by  Wilhelm  and  Engelschalk,  the  children  of  the  late 
marquis,  Arnulf  joining  in  from  Carinthia  on  one  side,  Zwenti- 
bold  from  Moravia  upon  the  other.2  Such  was  the  condition  of 
Christendom  upon  which  Hincmar's  sad  eyes  closed  in  Decem- 
ber, 882. 

All  round  their  headquarters  at  Conde,  as  far  as  the  Scarpe 
and  as  the  Somme,  the  Vikings  sent  their  devas- 

A  D  833 

tating  hordes  during  this  winter,  882-3.3  In  the 
summer  they  harried  Flanders.  Carloman  did  what  he  could 
to  defend  his  territories.  But  his  soldiers  had  lost  all  nerve 
and  energy.  It  seemed  as  if  the  Northmen  had  only  to  stretch 
out  their  hands  and  take  what  they  would.  Although,  there- 
fore, the  king  had  stationed  himself  with  an  army  of  observa- 
tion upon  the  banks  of  the  Somme,  he  did  not  venture  to 
engage  the  enemy,  but  retreated  as  they  advanced,  and  fell 
back  upon  Amiens ;  at  each  step  he  was  pushed  nearer  to  the 
centre  of  his  kingdom. 

A  meeting  of  Neustrian  nobles  was  held  at  Compiegne  to 
consult  what  could  be  done.  Clearly  the  presence  of  the  king 
and  the  royal  army  was  no  longer  any  protection.  They  must 
act  for  themselves.  But  the  kind  of  action  which  they  chose 
was  of  a  miserable  kind — nothing  better  than  the  old  expedient 
of  buying  off  the  enemy.     A  Christian   Dane 4  was  sent  to 

1  Ann.  FuU.,  Pt.  v.,  882,  says:  '  Bellum  .  .  .  inter  Saxones  et 
Thuringos.'  Cf.  also  883.  But  probably  for  '  Saxones '  we  should  read 
'  Francos.'     See  Dlknmler,  o.c.  ii.  215. 

2  A.  F.}  I.e.,  884.  3  Ann.  VedasU  s.a.  (P.  i.  200). 

4  '  Siegfred,  the  grandson  of  Horik '  [which  Horik  ?]  Ann.  Vedast. 
884. 


VIKINGS  AGAIN  IN  GERMANY.  463 

parley  with  the  invaders,  and  the  ransom  finally  fixed  upon 
was  the  enormous  sum  of  twelve  thousand  pounds  of  silver. 
We  may  put  the  value  of  this  in  modern  money  at  not  less 
than  ^300,000.  On  this  basis  a  truce  was  made  with  the 
West  Franks.  A  portion  of  the  Viking  army  took  ship  and 
sailed  round  to  the  north  of  the  Scheld  mouth,  returning  once 
more  into  German  territory. 

VI. 

And  here  dangers  of  all  kinds  had  begun  again  to  thicken 
round  the  path  of  the  emperor.     Little  trust  could 

AT)    ftR*? 

Charles's  subjects  place  in  his  power  to  defend 
them.  But  among  the  German  nobles  there  were  still  brave 
men  left.  As  in  France  Abbot  Hugh  seemed  to  be  the  main- 
stay of  the  State  (though  even  he  had  grown  strangely  inactive 
of  late),  so  for  Germany  there  was  still  a  defender  in  Duke 
Henry  of  Franconia.  Early  in  883  a  new  body  of  Vikings 
came  into  the  country  of  the  Lower  Rhine.  Godfred  had 
been  enfeoffed  with  his  vast  territories  in  Frisia  on  the  under- 
standing that  he  was  to  defend  these  parts;  but  he  made  no 
opposition  to  the  new  inroad.  The  new-comers  formed  a  camp 
at  Duisburg,  at  the  junction  of  the  Ruhr  with  the  Rhine,  and 
not  far  from  Diisseldorf.     In  the  autumn  of  884 

A.D  884 

half  the  immense  indemnity  of  12,000  pounds  of 
silver  was  paid  over  to  the  French  Viking  army  at  Amiens  ; 
and  it  left  the  country.1  Part  of  the  army  sailed  across  the 
channel  and  attacked  Rochester,  where  they  met  with  a  very 
different  treatment  at  the  hands  of  Alfred's  soldiers  from  any 
they  had  been  used  to  in  France.2  They  got  no  indemnity 
here ;  rather,  as  a  Norse  poet  sings, 

'They  got  smart  blows  instead  of  shillings, 
And  the  hammer's  weight  in  place  of  rings.' 

1  Regino  (P.  i.  594).  2  Asser,  s.a. ;  yEthelweard,  iv.  3. 


464  THE  INVASION  OF  GERMANY. 

Another  portion  sailed  to  Louvain,  in  Belgium,  and  settled 
there.1  In  December  of  this  year  the  Christians  could  rejoice 
in  the  report  of  a  victory  which  a  saint — that  saint,  too,  himself 
a  Dane  by  birth — had  gained  over  a  new  and  large  Viking 
host.  Rimbert  had  once  been  a  Danish  slave,  and  was 
brought  up  by  Anscar  to  be  a  missionary  to  his  countrymen. 
He  became  the  biographer  of  Anscar,  and  was  at  this  time 
Archbishop  of  Bremen.  When  a  Danish  fleet  landed  at 
Norden,  Rimbert  summoned  the  hardy  Frisians  under  his 
banner  and  attacked  them.  He  himself  stood  aside  from 
the  fray,  upon  a  mound,  offering  up  prayers  for  the  Christians. 
The  victory  was  a  brilliant  one  ;  the  chroniclers  tell  us  that  the 
whole  Viking  host,  ten  thousand  strong,  was  destroyed.2 

But  a  defeat  here  and  there  did  nothing  to  daunt  the  courage 
of  the  Northmen.  The  most  formidable  of  all 
'  those  settled  in  imperial  territory  were,  of  course, 
the  troops  of  Godfred.  Godfred  had  nominally  turned  Christian 
and  defender  of  the  empire,  but  was  in  reality,  it  was  feared, 
only  plotting  with  his  brother-in-law  Hugh  fresh  attacks  upon 
Charles  the  Fat  Before  long  he  paved  the  way  to  renewed 
hostilities  by  putting  forth  new  and  impossible  demands.3 
He  was  discontented  with  the  territory  assigned  to  him.  It 
contained  no  wine-growing  country.  To  supply  this  want  he 
asked  for  the  lands,  the  beautiful  vine-lands,  lying  between 
the  Mosel  and  Bonn,  Coblenz,  Andemach,  Sinzig,  &c.  Had 
the  request  been  granted,  the  Vikings  would  have  been  placed 
in  a  position  a  thousand  times  stronger  for  any  future  attack 
upon  the  heart  of  the  empire.  But  they  probably  cared  little 
whether  the  grant  were  made  or  refused.     Godfred  had,  no 

1  Regino,  I.e. ;   Veriast.,  s.a. 

2  Ann.  Fuld.  884  (Pt.  iv.) ;  Adam  of  Bremen,  Gcst.  H.  Font.  i.  41. 

3  Ann.  Fuld.,  I.e.,  and  Regino  (Pertz,  i.  594-6)  for  the  following 
account. 


MURDER  OF  GODtRED.  465 

doubt,  prepared  his  plans,  and  was  ready  to  march  against 
any  army  which  Charles  could  collect.  The  emperor,  if  de- 
feated, would  probably  have  been  deposed;  and  Godfred  would 
have  ruled  behind  the  name  of  Hugh  of  Lorraine,  another 
Orestes  behind  another  Romulus.  And  pleasant  was  the 
outlook  for  the  servants  of  Charles  the  Emperor  should  the 
furious  Hugo  ever  gain  any  power  over  them.  Yet  how  was 
the  request  which  Godfred  preferred  to  be  refused?  There 
was  no  open  way. 

But  there  weie  other  ways  which  were  not  open,  and  these 
began  to  be  whispered  between  the  emperor  and  Duke  Henry. 
The  latter  may  have  sought  to  reconcile  it  to  his  conscience  to 
use  towaids  the  Norsemen  means  which  they  themselves  never 
scrupled  to  employ.  Godfrt  d  was  invited  to  a  conference  for 
the  discussion  of  his  demands.  On  the  imperial  side  came 
Duke  Henry,  with  Willibert,  Archbishop  of  Cologne,  who, 
however,  was  kept  in  ignorance  of  the  intended  treachery,  and 
certain  of  the  lesstr  nobility,  among  whom  was  a  Count  Eber- 
hard,  or  Everard,  who  had  a  short  time  before  been  driven 
from  his  possessions  by  Godfred.  It  should  have  raised  some 
suspicion  in  the  mind  of  the  Dane  to  see  such  an  inveterate 
enemy  among  the  plenipotentiaries  ;  but  the  Northmen,  though 
full  of  treachery  themselves,  were  often  strangely  blind  to  it  in 
others ;  or  they  seemed  sometimes,  as  we  have  said  before,  to 
go  down  to  meet  their  fate  open-eyed.1 

The  meeting  took  place  upon  the  Batavian  island,  just 
where  the  mouth  of  the  Rhine,  which  continues  to  bear  that 
name,  separates  from  the  one  called  the  Waal.  After  some 
preliminary  conference,  during  which  Godfred's  suspicions,  if 
he  had  any,  were  laid  to  sleep,  Archbishop  Willibert  was 
despatched  to  bring  Godfred's  wife,  Gisla,  to  act  as  a  mediator 

1  See  Chapter  V. 
31 


466  THE  INVASION  OF  GERMANY. 

between  the  two  parties.  Gisla  had  been  sent  the  year  before 
with  a  message  to  the  emperor,  and  had  been  retained  by  him 
as  a  hostage.  Before  she  was  brought  back  the  two  conferring 
parties  met  again.  And  now  that  Godfred  was  unsuspicious 
and  his  attendants  unarmed,  there  was  no  difficulty  in  finding 
a  cause  of  quarrel  or  in  raising  the  hot  blood  of  the  Danes. 
As  the  altercation  grew  warm,  Eberhard  suddenly  drew  his 
sword  and  cut  down  the  Viking  leader;  then  the  imperialists 
fell  upon  the  attendant  Danes  and  massacred  them.  And 
now  the  Danish  host,  left  without  a  leader,  laid  aside  the 
scheme  of  conquest  which  Godfred  and  Hugo  had  hatched 
between  them.  Hugo  himself  had  been  invited  to  attend 
another  conference  at  Gondreville ;  and  almost  at  the  very 
time  that  Godfred  fell  he  was  taken  prisoner.  He  was  tried, 
and  condemned  to  lose  his  eyesight  and  to  be  confined  for  the 
remainder  of  his  days  in  a  monastery  ;  and  the  place  selected 
was  Prum,  which  had  already  received  one  royal  captive  and 
one  voluntary  prisoner  of  the  Carling  race.  There  Hugo  ended 
his  days  about  the  close  of  the  century. 

Meantime  a  new  Viking  fleet,  with  which  Godfred  had  been 
in  secret  communication,  broke  into  Saxony.  The  Saxons  had 
the  memory  of  a  recent  and  terrible  disaster  weighing  upon 
them.  Nevertheless,  they  assembled  in  large  numbers  to 
resist  this  attack.  Their  army  was  able  to  keep  the  Vikings 
in  check  ;  but  at  present  it  had  avoided  a  pitched  battle, 
which  the  Saxons  may  well  have  looked  forward  to  with  some 
fear.  While  affairs  were  still  in  this  doubtful  condition  a  fleet 
of  Frisians  suddenly  appeared  upon  the  Elbe.  Thus  the 
Danes  were  exposed  to  attack  both  in  the  front  and  rear; 
and  Saxons  and  Frisians  joined  battle  at  the  same  time.  After 
a  sharp  engagement,  the  Christians  gained  a  decisive  victory. 
The  Frisians,  with  their  fleet,  then  took  possession  of  the 
fleet   of  the    Danes,   and    possessed    themselves    of  all    their 


VIKINGS  DEFEA  TED  IN  SAXONY.  467 

accumulated  treasure.  In  this  wise  the  summer  of  885  turned 
a  brighter  prospect  towards  the  Germans,  and  the  news  of 
their  victory  resounded  on  all  sides.  In  England  they  heard 
of  it,  and  recorded  it  with  thanksgiving. 

In  reality  it  was  of  much  more  significance  than  con- 
temporaries supposed.  This  year  was  really  a  turning-point 
in  the  history  of  the  German  states.  The  death  of  Godfred 
and  the  victory  on  the  Elbe  checked  the  ardour  of  the  Vikings, 
and  did  indeed  save  the  country.  Before  their  memory  was 
wiped  out  by  fresh  successes,  the  energy  of  the  Northmen  had 
turned  in  another  direction.  Germany  had  been  in  imminent 
danger  of  an  absolute  conquest ;  but  that  danger  never  returned. 

In  the  western  kingdom,  whither  the  other  great  leader, 
Siegfred,  had  betaken  himself,  there  was  still  one  deadly 
struggle  to  be  fought  out  and  a  long  period  of  almost  anarchy 
to  be  passed  through ;  then  that  land,  too,  though  scarcely 
knowing  it,  would  have  passed  through  the  crisis  of  the  Viking 
malady.  And  though,  like  Ireland,  like  England,  it  was  for 
good  or  evil  (for  good  and  evil)  never  to  get  rid  of  the  effects 
of  these  attacks,  still  out  of  the  state  of  prostration  in  which  it 
now  lay  it  would  before  long  rise  to  a  gradual  and  hopeful 
convalescence. 


CHAPTER   XV. 

THE  SIEGE  OF  PARIS. 
I. 

About  the  time  that  St.  Rimbert  and  his  Frisians  were 
gaining  that  encouraging  victory  of  theirs  over  the  Danes  at 
Norden,  and  that  Godfred  and  Hugo  were  preparing  the 
great  stroke  for  which  in  the  end  they  both  paid  so  dear, 
Carloman,  the  young  King  of  France,  lay  dying.1  '  From  a 
wound  received  out  hunting,'  ran  the  official  bulletin,  '  in  a 
forest  near  Andelys.'2  Yes;  but  the  animal  who  inflicted  the 
wound  was  a  two-legged  one,  not  a  wild  boar  as  men.  were 
told  ;  it  was  one  of  Carloman's  young  companions  named 
Berhthold.3  It  was  an  accident ;  and  the  story  of  the  wild 
boar  had  been  circulated  by  Carloman  himself,  for  fear  lest 
popular  feeling  should,  after  his  death,  make  a  victim  of  the 
author  of  it.  It  is  curious  that  two  of  the  West  Frank  princes 
should  have  met  their  death  from  wounds  accidentally  inflicted 
by  one  of  their  comrades  during  a  hun  ing  expedition. 

The  only  remaining  descendant  of  Charles  the  Bald  was 

x  Dec.  12,  884.  a  '  The  forest  of  Basin  '  ( Fed.). 

3  Ann.  Le?no)-vic.  ;  Ann.  Laubac ;  Ann.    Vedast.,  the  best  authorities. 
Regino  gives  both  stories  (P.  i.  594). 


CHARLES  THE  FAT,  469 

Charles  (the  Simple),  the  posthumous  son  of  Lewis  the 
Stammerer,  still  quite  a  child.  In  such  troublous  times  as 
those  it  was  not  to  be  thought  of  that  an  infant  of  five  years 
should  occupy  the  throne  of  the  West  Franks.  So  nothing 
remained,  or  it  seemed  that  nothing  remained,  but  to  offer 
the  crown  to  Charles  the  Fat,  who  thus  at  length  appears, 
by  the  gift  of  Death  and  Fortune,  as  the  ruler  of  all  the 
vast  empire  which  his  great-grandfather,  Charlemagne,  had 
created :  all,  that  is,  save  the  kingdom  of  Aries,  or  Southern 
Burgundy,  where  Boso  still  maintained  himself  against  the 
world. 

It  was  into  a  melancholy  inheritance  and  into  a  charge  of 
heavy   responsibility    that    Charles    the    Fat    now 
stepped.     No  sooner  had  the  news  of  Carloman's 
death  b  »en  carried  as  far  north  as  Louvain,  where  lay  the  bulk 
of  those  Vikings  who,  under  Siegfred,  had  quitted  France  the 
year  before,  than  these  broke  up  their  camp,  murdered  their 
hostages,1  and  prepared  to  descend  once  more  into  French 
territory.     When  the  Xeustrian  nobles  heard  what  the  North 
men  had  done  they  sent  a  message  of  remonstrance.     Had  they 
not  been  promised  twelve  thousand  pounds  of  silver  on  condition 
of  leaving  the  country  (ree  ?     They  answered  that  their  agree- 
ment was  with  the  dead  king  — to  leave  him  in  peace.     Now 
that  the  grave  had  taken  him  into  its  charge  they  could  disturb 
that  peace  no  more.     What  a  prospect  did  this  insolent  reply 
open  out  for  France  during  the  coming  year  !2     A  brave  man 
might  have  shrunk  from  accepting  the  responsibilities  of  king- 
ship there.     Charles  the  Fat  did  not  shrink.     But  what  sort 
of  a  sword  and  buckler  he  proved  to  the  unhappy  country  we 
shall  presently  see.     It  shows  the  prestige  which  still  lingered 

1  Kept  till  the  residue  of  the  twelve  thousand  pounds  of  silver,  promised 
in  the  previous  year,  should  have  been  paid. 

2  See  Retrino,  I.e. 


470  THE  SIEGE  OF  PARIS. 

round  the  Carling  name,  that  it  was  still  thought  absolutely 
necessary  to  chose  for  France  a  king  of  that  race. 

Charles  was  in  Italy  when  an  embassy  from  the  nobility  of 
France,  at  the  head  of  whom  was  Hugo  of  Tours,  came  to 
offer  him  his  new  crown.  He  set  out  upon  his  return  journey 
early  in  the  spring  ;  and  by  the  middle  of  April  he  had  reached 
Lake  Constance.  When  he  approached  nearer  to  the  scene  of 
conflict  he  ordered  out  the  hereban  of  Lotharingia  and  Neustria 
against  the  Danes  in  Louvain.  But  he  did  not  himself  make 
any  show  of  taking  the  command ;  and  bereft  of  trustworthy 
leaders — for  Hugo  seems  to  have  been  wounded1 — the 
new  army  made  scarcely  an  attempt  to  attack  the  Vikings' 
camp.  Presently  it  dispersed,  each  man  returning  to  his  own 
home.2 

Anon,  when  the  summer  was  more  advanced,  the  Vikings'  sails 
were  again  descried  off  the  French  coast ;  3  and  now  Siegfred's 
fleet,  which  during  the  last  few  years  had  nearly  plundered  bare 
the  country  of  the  Scheld  and  Somme,  made  for  the  Seine, 
which,  save  for  one  visit  in  a.d.  876,  had  for  twenty 
years  been  spared  from  attack.  Rouen  once  more  felt  the 
devastating  arms  of  the  pirates :  she  was  plundered  on  the 
25th  of  July,  885.4  She  had  not  seen  the  enemy  within  her 
gates  for  four-and-forty  years.  According  to  some  accounts 
there  served  in  this  Viking  army,  and  thus  for  the  moment  in 
the  country  which  was  afterwards  Normandy,  the  great  Rolf 
himself.  The  hereban  of  Neustria  summoned  up  courage 
sufficient  to  march  against  the  Danes  ;  but  almost  at  the  first 
onset  its  leader,  Count  Reginald  of  Maine,  was  killed ;  s  the 
rest  of  the  army  thereupon  dissolved  in  panic,  and  the  North- 
men spread  havoc  all  around.  They  began  to  advance  farther 
up  the  Seine.     Paris  was  their  object,  Paris,  the  *  Queen  of 

•  Ann.  Ved.y  885.  a  Ibid.  Ibid.  «  Ibid.  *  Ibid. 


BEGINNING  OF  THE  SIEGE.  471 

Cities,' x  which  barred  all  progress  beyond  it  along  the  great 
trade  artery  of  France.  Among  the  most  fruitful  of  the 
engineering  works  set  on  foot  by  Charles  the  Bald,  had  been 
the  furnishing  of  Paris  with  fresh  fortifications,  and  blocking 
the  river  by  a  bridge. 

Meantime  the  emperor  remained  far  from  all  these  troubles. 
He  was  at  present  at  Regensburg  (Ratisbon),  upon  the  Danube. 
The  winter  of  885-886,  while  the  Northmen  were  drawing 
closer  and  closer  the  meshes  of  an  immense  fleet  and  army 
round  the  chief  city  of  his  new  kingdom,  he  seems  to  have 
passed  as  far  away  as  possible  from  the  scene  of  conflict,  in 
Italy. 

Nearer  and  nearer  came  the  Danes,  their  ships — seven  hun- 
dred large  vessels,  and  innumerable  smaller  craft — hid  the  water 
for  two  leagues  and  a  half;  so,  at  all  events,  Abbo  would  have 
us  believe.  A  huge  army  of  thirty  thousand  or  forty  thousand 
men  marched  along  the  banks  or  sailed  in  the  vessels.2  And 
the  emperor  was  far  off;  and  men's  hearts  were  paralyzed  with 
fear.  Where  was  Hugo,  the  mainstay  of  Western  France  ? 
Wounded  it  must  be,  in  that  he  still  stayed  away  from  the 
theatre  of  war.  But  happily  the  royal  city  is  not  without 
defenders.  Foremost  among  these  is  its  bishop,  Gozlin,  late 
Abbot  of  St.  Denys.     And,  after  him,  Count  Odo,  now  Count 

1  Nam  medio  Sequanse  recubans,  culti  quoque  regni 
Francigenum,  temet  statuis  per  celsa  canendo  : 
*  Sum  polis,  ut  regina  micans  omnes  super  urbes.' 

Abbo,  Bell.  Paris,  urbis,  i.  10-12. 

One  must  blush,  in  quoting  Abbo,  for  the  wretchedness  of  his  verse, 
perhaps,  taken  for  all  in  all,  throughout  the  long  poem,  as  bad  as  any  that 
the  Middle  Ages  have  produced  ;  as  the  prose  of  Saxo  Grammaticus  maybe 
reckoned  among  the  worst  Latin  prose  in  existence.  Nevertheless,  Abbo 
is  our  only  authority  for  the  details  of  this  great  siege  of  Paris,  of  which  he 
was  an  eyewitness.    The  leading  events  are  told  shortly  in  Ann.  Vedast.,&.c. 

-  Abbo,  o.c.  i.  11.  27-35,  IX5- 


472  THE  SIEGE  OE  PARIS. 

of  Paris,  the  eldest  son  of  France's  old  champion,  her  Judas 
Maccabeus,  Count  Robert  the  Strong.  Odo  and  Robert,  left 
children  at  the  untimely  death  of  their  father,  had  seen  his 
honours  and  fiefs  passed  over  to  another,  to  Hugh.  Now  they 
were  grown  to  man's  estate,  and  were  to  show  that  they  had 
inherited  something  better  than  abbeys  and  titles  from  their 
renowned  father.  Next  to  them  we  may  count  among  the  chief 
defenders  of  Paris  Eblus  or  Ebolus,  the  nephew  of  Gozlin, 
himself  also  an  ecclesiastic  and  Abbot  of  St.  Germain  des 
Pres;  Counts  Reginar,  Herivaeus,  Utto,  Erilang,  a  Knight 
Robert,  and  many  more,  deserve  commemoration.1 

Here,  then,  stands  Paris  upon  her  island.  Since  the  days 
of  her  earlier  attacks  at  the  hands  of  the  Northmen,  Charles 
the  Bald  had,  as  we  have  said,  furnished  her  with  two  bridges 
built  upon  strong  stone  piers.  One  connected  the  island  city 
with  the  north  bank  of  the  river,  the  other  with  the  south — 

Insula  te  gandet,  fluvius  sua  fert  tibi  gyro 
Brachia,  complexo  muros,  inulcentia  circum ; 
Dextra  tui  pontes  habitant  tentoria  lymphae 
Lsevaque  claudentes;  horum  hinc  inde  tutrices 
Cis  urbem  speculare  falas,  citra  quoque  flumen.2 

She  was,  we  see,  still  an  island  city  washed  by  the  river.  The 
northern  bridge,  which  stood  where  the  Pont-au-Change  now 
stands,  was  defended  by  a  wrooden  tower,  hastily  erected  or 
enlarged  upon  the  approach  of  the  great  fleet.  The  successor 
to  this  tower  was- the  Grand  Chatelet  of  the  Middle  Ages, 
which  stood  where  the  Place  du  Chatelet  now  stands. 

Siegfred,  when  he  came  opposite  the  city,  first  sought  a 
meeting  with  its  Governor,  Bishop  Gozlin.3  To  him  he 
declared  that  the  Danes  had  no  other  object  but  to  pass  higher 

x  Abbo,  o.c.  i.  11.  66-8,  95-113,  167,  245-6. 

*  Ibid.,  i.  11.  15-19.     One  of  Abbo's  involved  passages. 

3  LI.  36  sqq. 


ATTACK  ON  THE  TOWER.  473 

up  the  river,  and  that,  if  such  passage  under  the  walls  of  the 
town  were  granted  them,  no  injury  should  be  done  to  person  or 
property  within ;  which  protestations  those  might  believe  who 
chose.  Goztin  decisively  refused  to  believe  them,  or  to  grant 
the  permit  that  was  asked  ;  and  breathing  threats  of  vengeance 
Siegfred  took  his  departure  and  the  siege  began. 

The  most  valiant  of  the  garrison  were  told  off  to  defend  the 
tower  T — the  tete  de  fiont — at  the  end  of  the  northern  bridge, 
against  which  the  first  attacks  of  the  Vikings  must  be  directed. 
Gozlin  had  made  every  effort  to  complete  the  structure  of  this 
fort,  but  it  does  not  seem  yet  to  have  been  quite  finished.2 
Round  it  raged  for  two  days  an  incessant  combat.  The  de- 
fendants were  but  two  hundred,^  the  assailants  were  the  count- 
less host  of  the  Danes.  Whatever  deficiencies  the  Vikings 
still  showed  in  the  arts  of  peace  as  they  were  understood  in 
those  days,  in  the  arts  of  war  they  were  now  passed  masters. 
They  had  learned  all  there  was  to  learn  from  the  military  tradi- 
tions of  France,  the  best  of  which  were  traditions  handed 
down  from  the  days  of  ancient  Rome.  Thus  in  this  siege 
many  of  the  implements  of  whose  use  we  read  accounts  (under 
new  names,  perhaps),  are  such  old  increments  of  attack  and 
defence  as  we  can  recognize  portrayed  upon  the  column  of 
Trajan,  or  described  in  Roman  military  history.  Here  we  see 
battering-rams,  testudines,  musculi*  such  as  Caesar  describes  for 
us  in  the  *  Civil  War' :  these  now  figure  in  the  hands  of  rude 
barbarian  Northmen,  to  whom  Roman  civilization  as  a  whole 
was  but  a  vague  tradition,  or  a  shadowy  myth.  The  defenders, 
too,  employed  all  the  known  arts  of  those  days  to  keep  the 
enemy  at  bay.  But  though  few  of  their  implements  or  their 
opponents'  were  really  new,  yet  in  reading  the  account  of  the 
siege   we   might    fancy   sometimes    that  we   had  passed   ten 

1  LI.  6l  sqq.  8  LI.  78-9. 

3  LI.  114  sqq,  [P  is  the  Greek  Humeral,  g].  4  L.  99. 


474  THE  SIEGE  OF  PARIS, 

centuries  down  the  stream  of  time  ;  as  when  we  behold  the 
leaden  balls  raining  against  the  tower  or  flying  over  the  heads 
of  the  garrison;  or  the  Vikings  ad\ancing  to  practise  a  mine 
in  the  defences. 

The  morning  of  the  26th  of  November,  the  day  after  Sieg- 
fred's  dismissal  by  Gozlin,  the  northern  army  moved  out  from 
its  tents  to  attack  the  tower.  Count  Odo  and  Count  Robert 
were  both  within  it ;  so  were  Abbot  Ebolus  and  Count 
Ragenar.  All  day  the  storm  of  battle  raged  round  the  fort  and 
its  two  hundred  defenders.  From  within  every  arrow  found 
its  mark  in  the  dense  masses  of  the  enemy ;  boiling  pitch  and 
boiling  oil  descended  upon  the  heads  of  those  who  came  under 
the  defences.  They  had  to  rush  and  plunge  into  the  river  to 
extinguish  the  flames.  Yet  if  any  showed  signs  of  holding 
back  they  were  assailed  by  the  jeers  and  reproaches  of  their 
woman  kind,  just  as  a  thousand  years  before  had  been  the 
Teutones  who  invaded  Gaul  and  Italy.1  Such  had  always 
been  the  part  played  in  battle  by  tho^e  viragoes  of  the  North. 
At  last  the  besiegers  drew  off,  with  heavy  loss  and  without 
having  accomplished  anything.  And  yet  they  had  taken  the 
Christians  at  a  disadvantage,  for  the  defences  of  the  tower 
were  not  as  complete  as  they  might  have  been  made.  During 
the  night  after  this  first  attack  the  bishop  made  unheard-of 
efforts  to  complete  or  increase  these  defences  by  a  wooden 
structure,  and  in  the  morning  the  fort  stood  twice  as  high  as  it 
had  stood  overnight.2 

The  second  day's  fight  was  like  the  first.  Again  the  slings 
or  mangonels  hurled  stones  and  leaden  balls  against  the  tower. 
The  enemy  brought  mnsciili  or  mantlets  against  the  walls — 
wheeled  houses  protected  against  fire  by  skins  stretched  over 
the  roof — but  the  oil  and  pitch  pouring  from  the  tower  drove 

1  LI.  125  sqq. ;  cf.  Plutarch,  A/arius,  19.  a  L.  82. 


ATTACK  ON  THE  TOWER.  475 

back  the  Danes.  Not,  however,  before  a  mine  had  been  made 
under  one  of  the  walls  which  did  some  harm.  A  mine,1  not 
of  course  sprung  with  gunpowder,  but  dug  under  the  defences, 
its  roof  peihaps  supported  by  wooden  beams  for  a  while. 
Then  these  were  set  on  fiie,  and  the  whole  structure  crumbled 
down.  Such  mining  was  known  as  long  ago  as  the  days  of  the 
ancient  Egyptians. 

This  mine  did  no  great  damage.  Baffled  in  these 
attempts  the  Vikings  made  another.2  They  raised  a  bonfire 
near  the  wooden  walls  of  the  fort,  and  for  a  time  the  building 
was  in  imminent  d.inger.  But  a  heavy  rain  descended  and  put 
the  fire  out.  And  now  the  oriflamme,  the  sacred  banner  of  St. 
Denis,  was  displayed  from  the  city  walls — held  up  between 
two  lances,  not  floating  free  in  the  air ;  such  was  the  manner  of 
standard-bearing  in  these  days.  *  The  hearts  of  the  garrison 
are  raised,  the  Danes  oppressed  by  the  sight :  a  hundred 
catapults  discharge  and  stretch  dead  a  hundred  of  the  be- 
siegers.' 3  In  this  wise  ended  the  second  day's  assault.  The 
Danes  carried  off  the  slain  to  be  burnt  with  due  honour  in 
their  camp  ;  and  we  may  picture  the  red  funeral  fires  and  the 
cries  of  the  mourners  round  them  keeping  awake  this  night, 
the  27th  of  November,  885. 

Now  came  a  momentary  pause.*  After  two  days'  incessant 
fighting  the  Northmen  began  to  see  that  the  bridge  was  not  to 
be  carried  by  a  coup  de  mam.  They  now,  therefore,  established 
themselves  in  a  strong  camp  of  observation  in  the  Abbey  of 
St.  Germain  l'Auxerrois,  and  they  sent  out  bands  of  foragers 
to  harry  the  country  far  and  near,  and  to  collect  provisions  for 
the  camp  and  for  the  navy  during  the  winter.  Their  cavalry 
extended   its   raids   as  far   to  the   north  as   Rheims.     From 

x  '  Foramen,'  1.  136.     It  is  possible  that  the  word  means  only  a  breach. 
(See  Du  Cange  s.v.) 

"  LI.  144^^.  3  L.  157.  4  LI.  172  sqq. 


476  THE  SIEGE  OF  PARIS. 

many  parts  of  France  messengers  were  speeding  towards  the 
emperor  in  Italy,  showing  how  all  the  country  was  falling  into 
<he  hands  of  the  heathen.  But  Charles  was  long  before  he 
moved.  Never  had  Northern  Christendom  seemed  so  near 
becoming  an  utter  prey  to  the  Northmen  as.it  seemed  just  now. 

II. 

Through  the  earlier  winter  months  the  garrison 
A.D.  886.  to  & 

had   rest.      But   at   the   end    of   January   a   new 

attack  on  the  towTer  was  begun  in  due  form.     The  Danes  came 

swarming  out  of  their  camp  like  bees — 

En  proles  Satanee  subito  castris  furibnndae 
Erumpunt,  trepidis  minium  telis  oneratae; 
Ad  turrim  properant,  tenues  ut  apes  sua  regna 
Dislentis  adeunt  humeris  casiaque  thymoque 
Arboreisque  simul  vel  amoeni  flcribus  agri.1 

Always  did  the  Vikings  bring  to  bear. all  the  engineering 
skill  they  could  command.  They  made  Plutei  or  Musculi* 
covered  with  hides,  each  capable  of  holding  from  four  to  six 
men.  'They  make  (strange  sight)  3  three  machines  of  un- 
equalled size,  mounted  on  sixteen  wheels,  and  fashioned  of 
huge  pieces  of  oak  bound  together.  On  each  machine  is 
placed  a  battering-ram,  covered  by  a  high  roof.  Within  the 
house  they  could  hold  concealed,  it  is  said,  sixty  men.'  Such 
is  Abbo's  description  of  a  sort  of  tower  well  known  in 
mediaeval  warfare,  but  a  machine,  we  gather,  not  known  to  the 
garrison  of  Paris.  However,  for  some  reason  this  mighty 
engine  was   never  used.      The  fire  from    the  Christian    side 

1  LI.  227-231. 

2  These  musculi, e  rats '  or  c  cats,'  were  low-roofed  sheds  running  on  wheels 
or  rollers,  and  gradually  pushed  up  to  the  walls  so  that  the  besiegers  might 
begin  to  breach  them.  The  ro  fs  of  the  musculi  were  covered  with  hiues 
to  make  them  as  far  as  possible  tire-proof.  3  LI.  205  sqq. 


RENEWED  ATTACKS.  477 

destroyed  not  only  the  machines  but  the  engineers  of  them,1 
and  in  that  way  put  an  end  to  the  work. 

Plumbea  mille  volant  fusa  densissime  mala. 

In  three  divisions  2  the  Danes  advanced  under  testudines^ 
shielding  them  from  the  missiles  of  the  garrison,  one  division 
against  the  tower,  two  against  the  bridge.  Before  the  first 
they  tried  to  fill  up  the  foss*  by  pouring  into  it  clods  of  earth, 
straw,  grass,  leaves,  branches,  slaughtered  animals ;  and  at  last 
— oh,  horror  ! — they  massacred  their  prisoners  and  threw  their 
bodies  in  among  the  rubbish.  They  brought  their  battering- 
rams  to  bear  against  the  wooden  tower,  which  trembled  from 
base  to  summit.  Against  them  plied  the  arbolasts  and 
mangonels  of  the  defenders,  and  long  iron-pointed  beams 
wherewith  they  used  to  strike  and  disable  the  battering-rams 
of  the  Danes. 5  Next  the  besiegers  filled  three  of  their  ships 
with  inflammable  materials  and  towed  them  alongside  the  bank 
as  near  as  might  be  to  the  tower  and  the  bridge.6  The  wind, 
we  may  suppose,  was  blowing  up  the  stream,  so  that  when  the 
boats  had  to  be  abandoned  they  were  still  wafted  nearer  and 
nearer  to  the  defences.  The  citizens  looked  on  in  an  agony 
of  terror.  What  a  clamour  and  hubbub  within  the  walls  ! 
tears,  prayers,  and  groans  arising  on  every  side ;  the  church 
bells  ringing ;  the  brazen  roofs  of  the  churches  sending  up,  as 
missiles  struck  them,  a  lugubrious  groan  ;  trumpets  sounding  ; 
men  calling  to  arms.  Outside  the  Danes  answer  with  their 
wild  laughter  or  their  battle  cries,  singing  perhaps  against  their 
shields  with  Odin's  sound  the  bamtus,  or  striking  their  spears 
against  the  shield-rims. 

But — oh  joy! — the  boats  have  struck  auainst  two  of  the  stone 
piers  of  the  bridge — say,  better,  two  of  the  heaps  of  stones 


i  « 


Artifices.'  2  L.  249.  3  L.  302.  *  LI.  303  sqq. 

5  L.  360,  6  LI.  375  sqq. 


478  THE  SIEGE  OF  PARIS. 

on    which    the   bridge    is   raised — and    burn   themselves   out 
harmlessly  there.     So  the  Christians  now  may  laugh. 

Yet,  alas  for  all  these  heroic  efforts  !  Heaven  itself  seemed 
to  fight  upon  the  side  of  the  barbarians.  Towards  the  end  of 
the  winter  rains  (Feb.  6th)  z  the  Seine  rose  so  high  that  a  portion 
of  the  bridge  was  suddenly  swept  away  by  it,  and  the  tower 
and  its  defences  were  cut  off  from  the  island  city.  It  is  said 
that  at  this  moment  there  were  only  twelve  of  the  garrison  in 
the  tower;2  which  was  as  well,  for  in  any  case  their  capitula- 
tion must  have  been  only  a  matter  of  time.  But  these  twelve 
heroes  held  out  to  the  last,  till  the  Danes  succeeded  in  setting 
fire  to  the  building,  whereupon  they  sallied  forth  and  were 
slain  to  the  last  man. 3  The  Vikings,  prevented  from  reaching 
the  northern  bridge,  now  moved  to  the  south  of  the  town  and 
made  their  headquarters  in  the  other  St.  Gei main's  Abbey,  St. 
Germain  des  Pres. 

But  now  help  seemed  to  be  coming  from  without.  Gozlin 
had  sent  message  after  message  to  the  Caesar  and  to  Duke 
Henry,  his  representative  in  Germany.4  At  last,  towards  the 
end  of  February,  Henry  did  set  himself  in  motion  with  an 
army  which  he  had  gathered  in  Franeonia  and  Saxony.  But 
his  Germans  suffered  much  during  their  march,  for  heavy  rains 
were  still  falling.  Duke  Henry  brought  no  spirit  with  him  to 
the  relief  of  Paris.  He  made  one  night  attack  upon  the 
Danish  camp  s  and  then  withdrew,  having  accomplished  next 
to  nothing. 

For  all  that,  the  besiegers  made  no  progress.  Their  attacks 
on  the  southern  bridge  were  no  more  successful  than  had  been 

1  LI.  504  sqq.  ;  cf.  Ann.  Ved. 

2  Ermenfrid,  Eriveus,  Erland,  Odoacer,  Ervic,  Arnold,  Solius,  Gozbert, 
Uvido,  Ardradus,  Eimard,  Gozwin. 

3  Or  were  deceived  by  an  offer  of  their  lives ;  much  as  was  the  British 
garrison  of  Cawnpore.     (1.  559-) 

*  Abbo,  Bk.  ii.  I,  1  sqq.  s  March  27th. 


DEATH  OF  BISHOP  GOZLIN.  479 

those  to  the  north;  so  that  at  last  Siegfred  consented  to  come 
to  terms,  and  agreed  to  raise  the  s:ege  on  the  payment  of  an 
'indemnity'  of  sixty  pounds  of  silver;1  a  moderate  sum 
indeed  compared  to  the  12,000  pounds  which  the  same 
Siegfred  had  received  a  year  ago  from  the  people  of  Neustria. 
Matters  had  been  thus  arranged  when  of  a  sudden  Bishop 
Gozlin  d:ed,  worn  out  it  may  be  by  his  exertions,  or  killed  by 
the  pestilence  which  had  begun  to  rage  in  the  city.2  About 
the  same  time,  too,  died  Abbot  Hugh,  who  had  been  long 
invalided,  and  West  Francia  lost  her  doughtiest  champion. 
The  hearts  of  the  Christians  sank,  and  those  of  the  Danes 
were  filled  with  joy.  Truly  it  seemed  as  if  God  Himself  were 
fighting  upon  the  side  of  the  heathen. 

But  at  all  events  the  lesser  Divinities,  if  I  may  call  them  so, 
of  the  Christian  pantheon,  the  saints,  under  whose  protection 
stood  Paris  and  her  neighbouring  monasteries,  these  did  not 
desert  the  sacred  city.1  As  at  the  first  attack  upon  Paris 
by  Ragnar  Lodbrog  forty  long  years  since,  they  began  once 
more  to  put  forth  their  miraculous  powers.  Many  miracles 
vindicated  the  holy  soil  of  the  monasteries,  which  the  heathen 
were  profaning.  When  marauders  sought  to  drive  some  cattle 
from  the  fields  of  St.  Germain  des  Pres  the  beasts  stood  as  if 
rooted  to  the  ground,  and  could  not  be  moved.  One  Dane 
who  profanely  peered  into  the  tomb  of  St.  Germain's  father 
was  struck  blind;  another  who  tried  to  enter  that  of  the  saint 
himself  fell  dead  upon  the  spot — an  unseen  hand  struck  him 
dead.  A  fourth  scaling  the  high  tower  of  his  church  was 
thrown  headlong  and  fell  to  the  earth  in  the  sight  of  Count 
Odo  and  the  defenders  of  the  city.  And  the  night  after  Bishop 
Gozlin  died  a  Danish  sentinel  (Abbo  declares),  in  the  siience 
of  a  dark,  wet  night,  saw  St.  Germain  come  out  of  the  sepulchre 

»  Bk.  ii.  11.  40-1.  *  ii.  1.  67.  3  i.  H.  477  Sqq. ;  ii.  11.  8$  sqq. 


480  THE  SIEGE  OF  PARIS. 

in  which  the  bishop's  body  had  just  been  placed.  Another 
night  a  Christian  sentinel  witnessed  a  still  more  cheering  sight 
— the  same  saint  passing  round  the  city  walls  and  sprinkling 
them  with  holy  water.  Miracles  or  no,  or  only  that  best  of 
auguries,  men  fighting  for  the  defence  of  their  country,  the 
Danes  began  to  grow  weary  of  the  siege.  Siegfred,  we  saw, 
had  long  been  anxious  to  negotiate,  only  that  the  death  of 
Gozlin  had  inspired  the  Danes  with  fresh  ardour  for  their 
work. 

Yet  still  the '  more  determined  of  Siegfred's  followers 
would  not  hear  of  giving  in.  Then  he  led  them  once  more 
to  the  attack,  which  was  no  more  succ  ssful  than  previous 
ones  had  been,  and  mocked  at  them  as  they  were  driven 
back  from  the  walls  :  a  curious  picture  of  the  relations 
between  a  Viking  leader  and  Viking  troops  in  those 
days.1 

In  the  summer  the  pest  broke  out  in  the  city  with  terrible 
ravages.2  Count  Odo,  who  was  now  the  commander  of  the 
garrison,  determined  at  all  hazards  to  make  his  way  to  the 
emperor  and  urge  upon  him  the  desperate  condition  in  which 
they  all  stood.  3  During  Odo's  absence  the  command  devolved 
upon  Ebolus,  the  valiant  Abbot  of  St.  Germains.  Bravely  did 
he  organize  and  lead  numerous  sorties,  harassing  the  Danes  in 
their  camp.  The  garrison  had  but  two  comfortng  reflections 
to  dwell  upon — one  that  Siegfred  had  now  really  given  up  his 
command,  accepted  the  offered  ransom,  and  retired  with  a 
portion  of  the  army  out  of  France ;  the  second  that  surely  by 
this  time  the  Caesar  must  be  marching  to  their  relief.  Before 
long,  in  truth,  the  sun  lighted  up  for  the  besieged  the  shields 
of    Odo    and    his    troops    appearing    upon    the    heights    of 

1  Bk.  ii.  47  sqq.  This  event  is  placed  before  the  death  of  Gozlin  ;  but  it 
more  probably  succeeded  it. 

?  ij.  11.  154  sqq.  3  L.  163. 


DEA  TH  OF  DUKE  HENRY.  481 

Montmartre,1  a  pledge  of  further  help.  The  Danes  on  their 
side  perceived  his  approach,  and  drew  up  to  oppose  his  re- 
entry into  Paris.  But  Odo,  assisted  by  a  sortie  from  the  city, 
cut  his  way  through  their  ranks  and  returned  to  his  anxious 
garrison. 

In  July  the  emperor  held  a  council  at  Metz  to  consider 
measures  for  the  relief  of  Paris.  Finally  he  collected  an  army, 
and  with  deliberate  steps  set  out  towards  the  scene  of  combat. 
In  a  month  he  had  got  no  farther  than  Laon.  Here,  or  at 
Quiersey,  he  sent  forward  Duke  Henry  with  an  advanced  guard ; 
in  order,  no  doubt,  that  on  him  should  fall  the  brunt  of  the 
attack.  Wherefore  at  last  the  straining  eyes  of  the  watchmen 
on  the  city  walls  did  see  the  Imperial  banners  waving  on  the 
horizon,  and  before  long  the  duke  and  his  army  in  their  turn 
pitched  their  tents  upon  Montmartre.  The  Danes  were  now 
held,  or  might  at  any  moment  be  held  (so  to  say),  between  two 
fires.  But  they  were  not  wanting  to  themselves — and  in  truth 
the  bull-dog  obstinacy  with  which  these  Vikings  maintained 
their  hold  on  Paris  is  as  notable,  though  not  as  admirable,  as 
the  constancy  of  the  defenders  of  the  town.  The  Danes  took 
measures  for  guarding  their  front,  by  fosses,  palisades,  by  all  the 
arts  of  war  they  knew.  And  as  it  proved  with  fatal  success. 
For  the  too  confident  Henry,  riding  forward  to  the  attack  at 
the  head  of  his  troops,  came  down  suddenly  into  a  foss 
which  the  Danes  had  dug  in  front  of  their  lines  and  hidden 
by  branches  and  brushwood,  he  came  floundering  down  into 
the  ditch  and  was  straightway  dispatched  by  the  Danes  in  the 
very  sight  of  his  own  soldiers :  whereupon  these  lost  heart  and 
turned  back.  This  was  all  that  came  of  the  second  attempt 
to  relieve  Paris. 

Meantime  the  emperor  himself  was  delaying  and  delaying, 

*  .  .  .  montis  super  Odo  csecumina  Maitis 
Enituit.     (11.  196-7). 

32 


482  THE  SIEGE  OF  PARIS. 

and  letting  '  I  dare  not '  wait  upon  '  I  would.'  The  only  good 
fortune  which  befell  the  besieged  was  the  death  of  Sinrik,  the 
second  leader  of  the  Northmen,  Siegfred  having  departed  in 
April  last.  This  Sinrik  had  vowed  (over  the  Bragi  cup,  perhaps) 
that  he  would  fix  his  camp  by  the  very  source  of  the  Seine. 
What  he  did  accomplish  was  to  make  his  bed  in  the  stream, 
being  drowned  in  the  river  a  little  above  the  town.1  The 
besiegers,  however,  were  not  so  discouraged  as  to  be  prevented 
from  making  another  furious  attack  upon  the  defences  of 
Paris ;  and  once  more  arms  were  clashing,  bells  ringing,  women 
screaming,  monks  weeping,  monk  Abbo  among  them  ;  such 
an  uproar  as  Abbo  had  never  heard  before.2  Had  it  not  been 
for  the  courage  and  constancy  of  their  leaders,  the  garrison 
must  have  given  way.  'St.  Germains  himself  is  brought  to 
the  front;  he  comes  to  fight  upon  our  side!' 3  In  other  words, 
his  bones  come ;  the  relics  being  carried  round  the  ramparts 
to  encourage  the  combatants. 

After  this  a  third  attempt  at  relief  was  made,  less  ambitious, 
but  more  successful  than  the  others.4  Six  hundred  Fran- 
conians,  sent  forward  by  Charles,  forced  their  way  into  the 
town  from  the  heights  of  Montmartre.  The  garrison  on  their 
side  made  a  sortie,  and  the  result  was  a  victory  for  the 
Christians,  and  this  welcome  addition  to  the  strength  of  the 
defence. 

Finally,*  just  two  months  after  the  Mainz  Diet,  Charles  did 
at  last  himself  appear  with  the  main  body  of  his  army,  and 
fixed  his  camp  upon  the  same  hill  of  Montmartre  which  figures 
so  frequently  in  the  history  of  this  sie^e.  The  Danes  on  their 
side  withdrew  to  their  headquarters  upon  the  south  side  of  the 
river. 

To  this  extent,  then,  Paris  had  been  relieved.     It  is  true 

1  LI.  220-6.  8  LI.  227  8.  3  LI.  279-83. 

4  LI.  315-329.  5  LI.  330  ^f- 


RELIEF  OF  PARIS.  483 

that  in  the  course  of  the  siege  an  indemnity  had  already  been 
paid  to  one  leader  of  the  Danes,  and  yet  only  a  portion  of 
their  forces  had  withdrawn.  It  might  seem  as  if  the  defenders 
had  not  gained  much  by  their  long  agony.  But  in  truth  this 
siege  of  Paris  is  not  to  be  compared  to  any  mere  raid  and 
plundering  expedition — such  as  were  the  earlier  sieges  set  on 
foot  in  the  hope  of  booty  only.  This  we  must  look  upon  as 
part  of  a  scheme  of  conquest.  From  the  obstinacy  with  which 
the  Northmen  carried  on  their  operations,  it  is  clear  that  they 
attached  no  small  importance  to  the  success  of  their  endeavour. 
Almost  for  the  first  time  had  they  run  their  heads  against  one 
of  the  new  defences  set  on  foot  by  Charles  the  Bald,  and  for 
the  first  time  for  many  years  had  they  met  with  a  really  deter- 
mined resistance.  It  may  have  been  more  their  pride  than 
their  policy  which  made  them  obstinate  to  break  down  this 
opposition ;  but,  whether  they  knew  it  or  not,  policy  was 
deeply  interested  in  the  issue — the  whole  politikk,  the  whole 
civilized  state  of  Western  Europe  was  concerned  in  it.  It  is 
never  safe  to  indulge  in  speculation  as  to  what  would  have 
happened.  But  it  may  be  said,  at  any  rate,  that  there  seems 
no  reason  why,  if  Paris  had  fallen  at  once,  the  Vikings  should 
not  have  made  themselves  the  masters  of  France.  Events  in 
this  age  always  seem  to  hang  upon  a  thread ;  and  therefore 
it  is  the  more  unwise  to  prophesy  how  they  might  have  pro- 
ceeded in  different  circumstances.  One  cannot  say  why  the 
death  of  Godfred  should  have  saved  the  fate  of  Germany,  or 
at  least  of  Germany  north  of  the  Main.  But  so  far  as  we  can 
judge,  it  was  this  alone  that  did  so.  Nor  can  we  say  precisely 
why  the  obstinate  resistance  of  Paris  saved  the  fate  of  France. 
But  if  we  try  to  picture  what  would  have  happened  had  Paris 
made  little  or  no  resistance  to  the  invading  army,  we  must 
own  that  it  seems  to  have  done  this. 

The  Danes  were  now  in  their  turn  besieged  behind  their 


484  THE  SIEGE  OF  PARIS. 

lines.  No,  doubt  they  were  greatly  reduced  in  numbers. 
Easy  seemed  the  task  which  lay  before  Charles  with  his  great 
army — easy,  indeed,  compared  with  the  efforts  which  Odo  and 
his  garrison  had  been  making  throughout  the  last  year.  If  he 
dared  not  attempt  to  storm  the  Danish  camp  ;  to  keep  the 
enemy  shut  in  there  till  they  were  starved  into  surrender  ;  to 
make  every  effort  meantime  to  put  Paris  in  a  stronger  condi- 
tion of  defence  than  she  had  been  in  before ;  to  victual  her 
afresh,  to  clear,  as  far  as  might  be,  her  houses  of  pestilence ; — ■ 
this  was  the  plain  and  not  difficult  duty  of  the  emperor.  But 
now  he  proceeded,  as  was  his  way,  to  undo  as  far  as  possible 
the  good  that  had  been  achieved  by  his  lieutenants.  A  month 
dawdled  on,  and  nothing  was  done.  Then  came  the  news 
that  Siegfred  had  returned  to  the  Seine  with  a  new  army  and 
a  new  fleet.  Charles  was  at  once  panic-struck.  He  entered 
into  a  shameful  treaty  with  the  besiegers.  If  they  would  leave 
Paris  they  should  have  full  permission  to  pass  higher  up  the 
river  and  enter  Burgundy. 

Burgundy  scarcely  yet  knew  their  name — 

Nomina  tunc  ensem  quorum  perpessa  fuisti 
Nunc  vocitare  prius,  pigra  O  Bmgundia  bello, 
Neustria  praecluibus  thalamum  nisi  comeret  altis 
Jam  tibi  consilio  facilis  ;  verum  modo  jam  scis.1 

In  that  land  might  they  plunder  to  their  hearts'  content. 
For  Burgundy,  even  Upper  Burgundy  where  the  Vikings  now 
went,  was  little  attached  to  the  Carling  House.  It  had  been 
on  the  point  of  joining  with  South  Burgundy  and  Provence 
in  recognizing  Boso  as  its  king.  It  may  have  been  in  order 
to  give  the  Burgundians  a  lesson  that  Charles  the  Fat  granted 
this  free  passage  of  the  Vikings  into  their  territory.  But  what- 
ever else  he  did,  he  did  not  rivet  their  fealty  to  the  Carling 

« LI.  343-6. 


END  OF  THE  SIEGE.  485 

Hou?e.  The  next  year  Northern  Burgundy  found  the  oppor- 
tunity to  proclaim  herself  a  separate  kingdom,  to  cut  the  ties 
which  bound  her  to  Germany,  and  chose  for  her  ruler  Rudolf, 
a  scion  of  the  house  of  Welf  of  Altdorf. 

In  addition  to  this  disgraceful  provision  in  the  treaty  with 
the  Vikings,  Charles  further  agreed  to  pay  another  ransom : 
this  time  of  700  pounds  of  silver.1  'And  this,'  says  a  modern  his- 
torian, '  was  the  wretched  outcome  of  Charles's  expedition  for 
the  relief  of  Paris,  the  last  undertaking  of  the  United  Frankish 
Empire  represented  by  a  single  individual.3 

III. 

A  miserable  end  indeed,  and  on  all  fours  with     .  _   „„_ 

A.D.  887. 
the   finale  of  the  expedition  which  Charles  had 

undertaken  against  the  Danes  at  the  beginning  of  his  sole  rule 
in  Germany,  the  not  less  disgraceful  treaty  of  Elsloo.  It  was 
a  lesson  to  the  world  how  low  the  Carling  race,  and  with  it  the 
Carling  Empire,  had  fallen.  But  the  heroic  defence  of  Paris 
which  had  preceded  this  disgraceful  treaty,  whose  effects  even 
Charles  could  not  quite  destroy,  was  a  lesson  likewise  if  men 
would  take  it  to  heart.  It  was  a  sign  of  the  recuperating 
forces  of  nature  which  are  always  at  work  if  we  know  where 
to  look  for  them.  So  soon  as  Christendom  learnt  to  conform 
to  the  new  conditions  of  existence  which  the  unresting  stream 
of  time  had  been  shaping  out  for  her,  then  she  would  begin 
to  receive  the  full  benefit  of  the  restorative  powers  which  time 
brought  in  its  course.  A  single  Frankish  Empire  was  now 
an  absurdity,  so  far  apart  had  drifted  in  character  and  lan- 
guage and  interests  all  the  nationalities  out  of  which  it  was 
composed.  It  was  a  source  of  weakness,  not  of  strength. 
But  the  help  which  Paris,  the  queen  of  cities,  nay,  the  whole 

1  L.  339.  2  Diimmler,  Ostfrankische  Geschichte,  ii.  273. 


486  THE  SIEGE  OF  PARIS. 

Western  kingdom,  had  looked  for  in  vain  from  the  successor 
of  Charlemagne,  she  had  found  in  herself,  among  her  own 
sons.  Though  two  of  France's  great  heroes,  Hugo  and  Gozlin, 
had  died  last  year,  the  workshop  of  their  kind — the  officina 
heroum — had  not  ceased  to  produce. 

It  was  as  if  Robert  the  Strong,  the  ancient  defender  of 
France,  had  re-arisen  in  the  person  of  Odo,  much  as,  according 
to  the  old  legend,  Charlemagne  was  to  rise  again  some  day 
in  the  hour  of  Germany's  supreme  peril.  On  every  side  the 
states  which  had  formed  but  provinces  of  one  great  empire 
were  awakening  to  the  fact  that  they  would  be  happier,  better 
cared  for,  under  the  protection  of  some  lesser  ruler  who  was 
close  at  hand,  than  under  the  shadow  of  a  great  imperial  name. 
Thus  Aries  had  already  got  her  king  ;  Upper  Burgundy  in  the 
next  year,  888,  was  to  get  hers.     In  the  same  year  France 

a  -n  coo  made  a  like  change  of  dynasty.  When  Charles 
the  Fat,  from  weakness  and  ill-health  which  had 
long  troubled  him  (and  afford  the  only  excuse  for  his  inaction), 
sank  one  step  lower  down  into  something  like  sheer  imbecility, 
Germany  chose  herself  a  king  in  Arnolf,  the  brave  Duke  of 
Carinthia,  Carloman's  natural  son.  But  France  took  the  great 
step  of  raising  to  the  throne  of  Paris  and  the  throne  of  France 
Odo,  the  heroic  defender  of  the  city,  a  prince  of  a  new  race, 
no  scion,  legitimate  or  illegitimate,  of  the  house  of  Charle- 
magne. 

After  the  treaty  made  by  Charles  with  the  Danes  the  siege 
of  Paris  virtually  reached  its  termination.  However,  when 
they  had  ravaged  for  one  year  in  Burgundy,  the  Northern 
army  again  (in  the  spring  of  888)  appeared  before  the  city 
demanding  the  payment  of  the  stipulated  ransom.  The  Danes 
were  now  once  more  below  the  city,  in  their  old  headquarters 
of  St.  Germains  des  Pres.  Ascrich,  the  new  Bishop  of  Paris, 
and  Count  Odo  had  gone  to  collect  the  sum  demanded,  seven 


DEPOSITION  OF  CHARLES  THE  FAT.         487 

hundred  pounds  of  pure  silver.  But  the  Parisians  kept  good 
watch  against  the  enemy.  Meantime,  as  appears,  Siegfred 
had  again  entered  France  and  joined  forces  with  his  old 
comrades,  and  in  the  meantime,  too,  Charles  had  been  de- 
throned. Anon  Odo  and  Ascrich  returned,  and  the  fine  was 
paid.  It  was  paid  upon  condition  that  the  Vikings  should 
withdraw  from  the  country.  Instead  they  made  an  attempt 
to  slip  once  more  past  the  city  and  attain  the  region  of  the 
Upper  Seine.  But  they  were  met  by  Ascrich  and  the  valiant 
Ebolus,  and  were  beaten  back.1  However,  they  succeeded 
in  reaching  the  mouth  of  the  Marne ;  and  up  that  river  they 
sailed,  ravaging  far  and  wide  near  the  eastern  borders  of 
France.2 

Had  Godfred's  army  been  in  possession  of  the  territory 
which  it  had  once  nearly  won  upon  the  Mosel,  the  two  great 
hosts  of  Vikings  would  have  come  in  contact.  For  this  one 
wasted  the  country  as  far  as  Toul  and  Verdun.  They  wasted 
round  Meaux  and  Troyes,  and  as  far  back  again  as  Rheims. 
This  was  the  revenge  of  the  Northmen  for  the  twelve  months 
lost  over  the  Paris  siege.  But  they  showed  that  they  had 
taken  to  heart  the  lesson  of  that  siege,  in  that  they  confined 
their  depredations  to  the  open  country,  and  did  not  attempt 
to.  force  their  way  within  the  walls  of  the  cities.  This  change 
of  plan  is  the  first  mark  of  a  decline  of  the  wave  of  conquest, 
though  the  amelioration  in  the  condition  of  the  country  would 
scarcely  be  discernible  for  some  years  to  come. 

IV. 

The  political  events  which  followed  immediately  after  the 
siege  of  Paris  were  of  such  supreme  importance  that  they 
turned  men's  eyes  for  a  moment  away  from  the  Viking  diffi- 
culties. 

1  L.  396.        *  LI.  430  sqq.     Ebolus  was,  it  appears,  slain  at  this  time. 


488  THE  SIEGE  OF  PARIS. 

The  process  of  disintegration  in  the  empire,  which  the 
Northern  raids  had  done  their  part  to  hasten,  had  now 
reached  a  crisis.  And  thus  upon  this  side  the  Vikings  may 
almost  be  said  to  have  done  their  work.  True,  there  are 
no  actual  stopping-places  in  history,  and  we  can  never  say 
that  any  force  is  really  spent.  The  artificial  divisions  made  by 
the  close  of  reigns  and  dynasties  often  in  reality  fall  in  the 
middle  of  a  new  era.  It  would  be  hard  to  say  whether  this  be 
not  true  of  the  close  of  the  Carling  dynasty ;  whether  the  final 
disappearance  of  the  Carling  House  from  history  is  so 
memorable  an  epoch  as  that  upon  whose  threshold  we  now 
stand — but  do  not  mean  to  overstep — the  final  division  of  the 
empire,  the  final  separation  of  the  Eastern  and  Western  kingdoms, 
and  the  rise  of  many  new  thrones  on  which  sit  sovereigns  not 
of  Carling  blood. 

.  _  These  changes,  we  have  said,  followed  immedi- 

ately upon  the  ending  of  the  siege  of  Paris,  and  may 
be  reckoned  in  no  small  part  the  outcome  of  that  siege.  Charles's 
conduct  in  that  gave  the  coup  de  grace  to  any  reverence  which 
he  may  still  have  commanded.  His  incapacity  for  all  the 
duties  of  a  ruler  was  too  apparent.  Statecraft  was  not  hedged 
round  with  the  network  of  custom  which  nowadays  impedes 
a  change  of  government.  And  so  when  the  forces  which 
kept  alive  men's  conservative  instincts  once  failed,  revolution 
became,  as  it  became  just  nine  centuries  later  in  France,  '  the 
order  of  the  day.' 

Our  pity  cannot  in  justice  be  withheld  from  the  unfortunate 
Charles.  He  was,  for  one  thing,  in  wretched  health,  suffering 
tortures  of  headache  during  the  last  two  years  ;  and  this  bodily 
condition  may  afford  the  explanation  of  many  of  his  acts  of 
weakness.  He  had  been  epileptic  as  a  young  man — as  were 
many  members  of  his  house — and  been  troubled  with  strange 
visions  :  thought  at  one  time,  in  a  fit  of  remorse  after  rebelling 


SEPARATION  OF  GERMANY  AND  FRANCE.    489 

against  his  father,  that  he  had  Satanas  right  inside  of  him,  and 
ran  to  Lewis  to  confess  and -be  exorcised.  It  seems  probable 
that  at  the  present  time  his  brain  was  softening.  By  the  death 
of  Duke  Henry,  killed  in  the  trench  before  Paris,  Charles  lost 
his  right  hand  and  his  trustiest  follower.  Others  in  whom  he 
trusted  were  driven  from  his  side  by  popular  clamour.  His 
wife  now  deserted  him  of  her  own  accord  and  retired  into  a 
monastery.  And  the  mental  condition  of  the  kaiser  was  such 
that  the  ship  of  the  state  seemed  to  be  drifting  sailless  and 
rudderless  before  storms. 

At  length,  in  November,  while  the  emperor  was  at  Trebur, 
where  he  had  been  at  last  induced  to  summon  a  diet,  Arnolf 
of  Bavaria  put  himself  at  the  head  of  an  army  and  marched 
upon  the  town.  It  is  likely  that  this  course  of  action  had  been 
pre-arranged,  for  everybody  almost  fell  away  from  the  king  at 
the  first  news  of  Arnolfs  approach.  '  He  was  abandoned  by 
all  his  subjects,  who  chose  Arnolf,  son  of  Carloman,  to  be  king ' 
of  Germany.  In  January  of  the  following  year  Charles  was 
dead 

And  now  a  way  was  opened  for  the  action  of 

A.D  888 
those    centrifugal   forces    which    had    long    been 

drawing  apart  the  different  nationalities  in  the  empire  of 
Charles  the  Great.  The  Latin-speaking  races  separated  them- 
selves at  once,  and  we  may  say  for  ever,  from  the  history  of 
Germany.  Arnolf — not  a  legitimate  Carling,  we  remember — 
was  chosen  in  the  latter  country  only.  In  Italy  the  crown 
alternated  between  the  two  rival  claimants,  both  Italians — 
Berengarius,  Count  of  Friuli,  and  Wido,  Duke  of  Spoleto. 
The  kingdom  of  Upper  Burgundy  came  into  existence,  and 
fell  to  the  share  of  Rudolf  the  Welf,  Abbot  of  St.  Maurice. 
Lower  Burgundy  and  Provence  (Boso's  kingdom  of  Aries)  were 
falling  into  fearful  anarchy  ;  for  Boso  was  dead,  and  his  son 
and  successor  was  a  boy.    The  Vikings  plundered  his  kingdom 


490  THE  SIEGE  OF  PARIS. 

in  the  north,  the  Saracens  attacked  it  from  the  side  of  the 
Mediterranean. 

Finally,  France,  as  we  know,  rejecting  all  Arnolfs  claims  to 
retain  this  portion  of  the  dominion  of  Charles  the  Fat,  chose 
Odo  for  her  king,  the  first  of  the  Capetan  House.  And  this 
choice  is  of  not  less  importance  than  the  final  enthronement  of 
the  house  under  Odo's  great-nephew,  Hugh  Capet  himself. 

These  are  the  events  which  make  the  end  of  one,  and  the 
beginning  of  a  new  era  in  the  history  of  the  empire. 

For  a  while  chaos  seems  to  descend  in  its  blackness  over 
Western  Europe.  The  annalists  leave  off  writing  annals :  the 
ravagings  of  the  Norsemen  spread  on  all  sides.  But  very 
soon  a  favourable  change  sets  in  in  the  character  of  the  Viking 
attacks.  We  have  no  internal  history  of  these  Northmen— as 
yet :  no  clue,  therefore,  to  the  arms  and  policy  of  their  leaders. 
But  we  can  hardly  look  upon  the  great  invasion  of  Germany  in 
881-2,  or  the  great  attack  upon  Paris  in  885-7  as  directed 
in  each  case  by  any  lesser  ambition  than  that  of  conquering  a 
country.  We  must  remember  that  the  Danes  who  bore  part  in 
these  expeditions  were  either  the  same  men,  or  were  in  close 
relations  with  the  same  men,  who  had  for  years  been  engaged 
in  a  great  effort  to  conquer  England — an  effort  which,  if  it  had 
not  succeeded  to  the  top  of  their  desires,  had  certainly  not 
altogether  failed.  We  may  justifiably  look  upon  the  two  great 
undertakings  of  Godfred  and  Siegfred  in  881  and  885  as 
pendants  to  the  undertakings  of  the  Great  Army  in  England 
between  866  and  878.  Very  different  from  such  vast  schemes 
were  the  isolated  attempts  to  make  settlements  in  the  empire 
which  had  long  been  going  on.  To  these  the  wisest  of  the 
Vikings  were  in  the  end  to  return  and  to  confine  themselves  for 
the  future.  A  young  Viking,  Rolf,  who,  according  to  some 
accounts,  was  in   England  during  part   of  the  great  years  of 


SCANDINA  VIAN  STA  TES  IN  EUROPE.  491 

invasion,  and  who  was  much  more  probably  in  many  of  the 
Viking  expeditions  undertaken  between  the  years  881  and  887 
upon  the  Continent,  was  destined,  by  confining  his  ambition 
within  narrower  limits  than  had  done  such  leaders  as  Siegfred 
and  Godfred,  to  create  the  only  permanent  northern  state 
within  the  limits  of  the  ancient  Carlovingian  Empire.  The 
history  of  the  Danes  in  Normandy  belongs  to  another  stage  in 
the  relations  of  Christendom  with  the  people  of  the  north. 

Before  we  utterly  shut  the  book  upon  this  page  of  history, 
let  us  take  one  glance  over  the  portion  of  Europe  which  has 
now  for  just  one  century  been  the  wide  theatre  for  the  achieve- 
ments of  the  Vikings,  and  see  what  their  solid  accomplishments 
have  been  either  in  the  way  of  good  or  evil. 

Nay,  for  one  moment  let  us  cast  our  eyes  farther  even  than 
the  wide  area  of  the  Viking  invasions,  properly  so  called.  For 
that  almost  nameless  history  of  the  early  Scandinavian  doings 
in  Russia  has  passed  through  its  first  stage ;  and  there  is  by 
this  time  a  well-established  dynasty  of  Swedish  princes  en- 
throned in  Novgorod.  These  Russian  Northmen  are  in  com- 
munication with  the  Byzantine  Court,  furnishing  the  emperors 
with  their  famed  Varingian  guard  ;  at  times  passing  down  to 
the  ^Egean  and  carrying  on  their  own  piracies  on  that  side  of 
the  world.  Pass  westwards  from  Gardariki,  and  we  come  to 
the  Scandinavian  countries  proper.  These  are  undergoing  a 
ferment  of  their  own — all  tending  towards  a  new  era  in  which 
the  petty  kingships  in  Denmark,  Sweden,  and  Norway,  are  to 
be  fused  into  a  single  rule  in  each  country.  This  era,  too,  has 
begun.  Gorm  the  Old  reigns  as  sole  King  of  Denmark — at 
least  it  is  believed  that  his  sole  reign  begins  about  this  time, 
a.d.  883,  just  two  years  before  the  beginning  of  the  Paris  siege, 
is  the  date  usually  assigned  to  the  battle  of  Hafirsfjord, 
whereby  Harald  crushed  his  rivals,  the  petty  kings  of  Norway, 


492  THE  SIEGE  OE  PARIS. 

and  raised  himself  to  be  the  monarch  (not  yet,  indeed,  the  uni- 
versally acknowledged  one)  of  that  country.  The  history  of 
Sweden  at  this  moment  is  more  obscure.  But  there  is  no 
doubt  that  she  followed  at  a  short  distance  of  time  the  lead 
of  Denmark  and  of  Norway. 

Then  again  the  Vikings  had  ere  this  founded  earldoms  in 
the  Orkneys  and  the  Shetlands.  They  had  conquered  Caith- 
ness and  part  of  Sutherlandshire—  nay,  more  or  less  imperfectly, 
all  Scotland  north  of  the  Grampians.  As  for  the  farther  islands 
of  the  ocean,  there  was  no  conquest  to  be  made  in  them — only 
the  killing  or  driving  forth  of  a  few  stray  monks,  papas,  or  hermits. 
This  process  had  begun  as  early  as  825,  when  a  Norseman, 
Grim  Kamban,  brought  a  colony  of  his  countrymen  into  the 
Faroes.  The  Norwegian  settlement  in  Iceland  date's  from 
875.  And  the  Icelandic  sagas  profess — and  seem  to  be  able 
to  support  the  boast — that  they  give  historic  accounts  of  the 
Icelanders  from  the  first  moment  of  the  colonization  of  the 
island.  So  that  from  their  side  historic  light  begins  now  to 
shine  upon  the  career  of  the  Northmen;  and  it  touches  some  of 
the  personages  connected  with  the  Viking  history  of  these 
days. 

Ireland  :  we  have  long  lost  sight  of  Ireland.  When  we  last 
looked  upon  it,  the  history  of  the  Norsemen  there  was  entering 
upon  a  new  stage.  They  had  obtained  as  much  of  a  footing 
in  the  country  as  they  thought  necessary.  Then  a  new  Viking 
nationality,  the  Danes,  after  long  abandoning  that  field  of 
labour,  had  returned  there  once  more,  and  a  momentary  lift  in 
the  mist,  which  wraps  round  the  history  of  the  country, 
showed  us  the  arms  of  the  Vikings  no  longer  turned  upon 
their  old  victims  the  Gaedhil,  but  turned  against  one  another. 
Then  the  clouds  swept  down  again.  These  momentary  victories 
of  the  Danes  were  probably  followed  by  other  defeats  :  for 
through  the  chain  of  Norse  '  stations  '  in  the  Hebrides  and  the 


SCANDINA  VI AN  STA  TES  IN  EUROPE.  493 

other  Scottish  conquests,  Ireland  was  now  in  much  closer 
relations  with  Norway  than  with  Denmark,  and  the  stream  of 
Norse  invasion  was  much  more  continuous  than  the  Danish. 
Wherefore  the  next  event  worth  remembering  is  that  Anlaf 
(Olaf)  the  White  came  from  Norway  and  attained  the  kingship 
over  all  the  Scandinavians  in  Ireland,  Dubh-Gaill,  and  Finn- 
Gaill  (Danes  and  Norsemen)  alike,  and  that  the  Irish  kings 
themselves  paid  him  tribute. 

The  connection  of  this  belt  of  Northern  settlements  in 
Ireland  and  Scotland  is  illustrated  by  the  intermarriages 
among  the  different  families  who  held  rule  therein.  This 
Olaf  of  Ireland  married  the  daughter  of  the  Earl  of  the 
Hebrides,  Ketil  Flatnose  by  name.  Ketil  was  sent  by 
Harald  Haarfagr,  the  new  king  of  Norway,  to  subdue  the 
Viking  settlements  in  the  Hebrides  (the  Sudreyar),  and  make 
these  islands  into  an  earldom  under  the  King  of  Norway. 
So  say  the  Icelandic  sagas.  But  whether  sent  by  Harald  or 
no,  Ketil  must  have  established  himself  in  the  Western 
Islands  long  before  Harald  had  subdued  his  rivals  at  the 
battle  of  Hafirsfjord.  The  daughter  of  Ketil  Flatnose  and 
wife  of  Olaf  the  White  was  called  Aud.  After  the  death 
of  her  husband  and  of  her  son  she  went  to  Iceland  and 
became  numbered  among  the  early  settlers,  the  Mayflower 
emigrants  so  to  say,  whose  descendants  formed  the  aristocracy 
of  that  republic.  In  Iceland  her  name  was  well  known  as 
Aud  the  Wise,  and  something  of  her  parentage  and  past 
history  is  no  doubt  correctly  preserved  in  the  Icelandic  sagas. 

Thus,  as  we  have  seen,  a  new  light  begins  to  steal  over  the 
history  of  the  Scandinavians  in  the  West,  in  Ireland  and  Scot- 
land, just  at  the  time  when  the  light  which  came  from  the 
Christian  chroniclers  is  growing  dimmest,  and  here,  too,  we 
feel  we  are  upon  the  borders  of  a  new  era. 

Of  the  relations  of  these  different  Scandinavian  States  in 


494  THE  SIEGE  OF' PARIS. 

Ireland  and  Scotland  with  each  other  or  with  the  native  king 
doms  in  either  country,  something  might  be  told,  somethinj 
laboriously  gathered  from  stray  notices  and  meagre  chronicles. 
But  here,  the  close  of  this  volume,  is  not  the  place  to  tell  it. 
In  the  native  kingdoms  in  Ireland  no  material  change  had 
come  about  after  the  days  when  the  Northmen  settled  them- 
selves firmly  in  their  different  colonies.  In  Scotland,  on  the 
contrary,  great  changes  came  about.  The  Pictish  dynasty 
came  to  an  end,  and,  partly  by  conquest,  partly  by  inheritance, 
it  was  succeeded  by  the  dynasty  of  the  Scottish  kings  of  the 
West,  so  that  Pictland  and  Scotland  became  united  into  one 
kingdom,  under  a  race  of  Scottish — that  is  to  say  originally  of 
Irish — kings. 

The  first  accession  of  a  Scottish  king  to  the  throne  of  the 
Picts  took  place  in  844.  But  the  union  of  the  two  kingdoms 
was  not  finally  established  until  the  time  at  which  our  history 
ends  (889),  when  the  kingdom  took  a  new  name  and  became 
the  Kingdom  of  Alban.  The  power  of  the  kings  of  Alban 
never  extended  to  the  northern  part  of  the  country  (Caithness 
for  instance),  which  we  must  reckon  as  a  part  of  the  Scan- 
dinavian earldom  of  the  Orkneys. 

It  was  probably  about  the  time  of  the  establishment 
of  the  Kingdom  of  Alban  that  the  Orkney  earldom  became 
established  as  a  dependency  of  the  Kingdom  of  Norway  under 
the  '  First  Earl '  Sigurd,  brother  of  Rognvald  Earl  of  Maeri, 
one  of  the  companions  in  arms  of  Harald  Haarfagr,  who, 
according  to  the  Norse  tradition,  was  the  father  of  Rolf  of 
Normandy. 

In  Ireland  the  kingship  of  Olaf  the  White  was  followed  by 
that  of  Ivar  (his  brother,  by  what  appears),  who  accompanied 
the  king  in  many  of  his  raids  ;  but  the  exact  date  at  which  Ivar 
began  to  rule  alone  is  not  ascertainable.  In  870  the  plunderings 
of  Ireland  ceased.     '  Now  for  a  while  were  the  men  of  Ireland 


CHRISTIANITY  AMONG  THE  DANES.  495 

free  from  plunderings  of  the  strangers,  namely,  for  forty  years, 
that  is  to  say,  from  Maelsechlain's  reign  till  the  year  before  the 
death  of  Flann  till  the  accession  of  Niall  Glundubh  (916). 
Then  it  was  that  Ireland  again  became  filled  with  the  ships  of 
the  strangers.' 

Scotland  was  not  so  free.  We  hear  of  plunderings  by  Olaf 
and  Ivar  together,  of  a  plundering  by  Olaf  s  son,  Thorstein  the 
Red,  of  plunderings  from  the  Orkney  Islands  in  the  north. 
But  the  worst  brunt  of  these  fell  upon  the  northern  half  of  the 
country,  which  can  scarcely  be  reckoned  as  a  part  of  the  new 
Scottish  kingdom,  the  Kingdom  of  Alban. 

In  England  again  /Elfred  still  held  the  reins  of  government, 
and  no  material  change  took  place  in  the  relations  of  the 
English  and  Norsemen,  only  that  the  two  peoples  were  to 
some  extent  amalgamating,  and  that  the  way  was  being  pre- 
pared for  the  subjugation  of  the  Mercian  and  East  Anglian 
kingdoms  under  Eadweard  the  Elder,  which  was  the  chief 
event  of  Viking  history  in  England  during  the  ensuing  century. 
In  Northumbria  the  fierce  Halfdan  had  died,1  and  had  been 
succeeded  by  a  Christian  Dane,  who  owed  his  election,  it  is 
said,  to  the  miraculous  intervention  of  St.  Cuthbert.  Here 
too  the  vigour  of  the  old  Viking  spirit  was  being  under- 
mined ;  while  Alfred  checked  its  more  open  display.  The 
similarity  of  the  English  and  Danish  characters  and  the  spread 
of  Christianity  among  the  Danes  was  leading  to  a  fusion  of  the 
two  peoples. 

If  we  could  imagine  some  passionate  adherent  of  Odin- 
worship  who  had  looked  forward,  during  the  last  seventy  years, 

1  There  are  three  different  accounts  of  Halfdan's  death — Ann.  Ult.  876  ; 
Font.  Ann.  874  (Beth=877)  ;  War  of  Gaedhill,  p.  27  ;  these  authorities 
represent  him  as  killed  at  the  battle  of  Strangford  Lough,  A.D.  877.  See 
also  Steenstrup,  Norman ne>  ne,  ii.  91  Asser  says  he  was  killed.  iEthelweard, 
'■'lor.  ll'tg,  that  he  was  killed  at  Wodansfeld  in  A.D.  911. 


496  THE  SIEGE  OF  PARIS. 

with  growing  hope  to  the  suppression  of  Christianity  and  the 
establishment  of  a  great  confederation  of  heathen  nations  in 
the  north  of  Europe,  such  an  one  would  have  now  felt,  from 
causes  which  he  himself  could  not  well  explain,  those  hopes 
gradually  diminishing.  And  could  he  have  looked  over  all 
Europe  and  noted  the  course  of  Viking  history  in  every 
:ountry,  he  would  have  been  inclined  to  date  the  year  887  or 
188  as  about  the  turning-point  in  these  prospects.  He  would 
iot,  I  say,  have  been  able  to  explain  to  himself  why  it  was  so. 
io  more  can  we  j  but  the  fact  remains. 


CHAPTER    XVI. 

THE  CREED  OF  CHRISTENDOM. 

I. 

We  have  brought  our  study  of  the  first  era  of  Viking  conquest 
to  an  end.  We  have  done  this,  not  because  the  wave  of 
Scandinavian  conquest  had  yet  reached  its  height,  but  because 
Christendom,  as  a  whole — Christendom  considered  in  its 
inward  as  well  as  in  its  outward  aspects — had  now  passed 
through  its  greatest  trial  at  the  hands  of  the  heathens  of  the 
north.  In  many  directions  more  effective  Scandinavian  con- 
quests succeeded,  during  the  ensuing  century,  to  those  already 
made.  Rolf  made  his  settlement  in  Normandy,  and  introduced 
the  most  permanent  Northern  element  into  the  state  of 
France.  In  the  century  succeeding  that,  Denmark  rose  to 
such  a  height  of  power  that  a  Danish  king  accomplished  what 
the  Vikings  had  never  been  able  to  effect — the  total  subjection 
of  England. 

But  in  none  of  these  cases  did  the  battle  between  Heathen- 
dom and  Christendom  assume  such  a  momentous  shape  as 
during  the  period  with  which  we  have  been  dealing.  The  war 
of  nationalities  continued,  but  it  was  no  longer  likewise  a  war 
of  creeds.     The  Norman  dukes  became  Christians,  and  not 


498  THE  CREED  OF  CHRISTENDOM. 

Christians  only,  but  Catholics  of  the  Catholic.  And,  as  was 
said  on  a  former  page,  the  true  measure  of  the  difference 
between  the  conquest  of  Cnut  and  the  conquests  of  the  Great 
Army  is  given  when  we  see  the  King  of  Denmark  and  England 
kneeling  beside  the  tomb  of  St.  Eadmund,  taking  the  crown 
from  his  own  head  and  placing  it- upon  the  shrine  of  the  martyr. 

In  Germany  again  the  great  wave  of  Viking  invasion  broke 
when  Godfred's  army  paused  at  Coblenz.  And  now  a  new  foe 
to  that  country  had  appeared  above  the  horizon — a  foe  not  less 
terrible  than  the  Vikings,  but  of  a  totally  different  character ; 
I  mean  the  Magyars.  And  in  the  history  of  Germany  the 
northern  nations  soon  cease  to  play  an  important  part. 

Insensibly  the  Scandinavian  ambition  and  policy  began  to 
take  a  new  direction.  It  began  to  form  that  vast  outlying 
confederacy  of  northern  peoples  which  stretched  in  a  huge 
arc  round  the  central  states  of  Christendom — from  far  down 
the  Dnieper  upon  the  one  side  to  the  distant  islands  of  the 
North  Atlantic  on  the  other.  From  a  small  central  district, 
comprising  the  most  part  of  Denmark,  the  Baltic  Isles, 
Southern  Sweden,  a  strip  of  Southern  Norway,  grew  up  this 
vast  enlarged  Scandinavia,  which  consisted  of  the  Scandinavian 
countries  proper,  Greater  Suithiod  in  Russia,  some  settlements 
upon  the  southern  shore  of  the  Baltic,  the  Scandinavian 
states  in  the  north  of  England,  the  north  of  Scotland,  the 
Scottish  isles,  Man,  the  three  'kingdoms'  in  Ireland,  the 
Faroes,  Iceland,  Greenland,  a  tiny  portion  of  America  even. 
But  in  spite  of  its  imposing  size,  this  greater  Scandinavia  lay 
outside  (in  every  sense)  the  nations  of  Christian  Europe ;  only 
here  and  there  did  it  come  in  contact  with  them. 

The  rise,  therefore,  of  this  greater  Scandinavia,  and  its 
internal  history  when  it  had  arisen,  are  (it  seems  to  me)  the 
proper  subjects  for  a  separate  study ;  and  may,  I  hope,  be 
some    day  the  subject  of  a  succeeding  volume.     In  connec- 


CONFLICT  OF  CREEDS.  499 

tion  therewith — seeing  that  we  should  still  deem  ourselves 
concerned  with  the  history  of  Heathendom  and  Christendom — 
it  would  be  proper  to  introduce  a  distinct  study  of  the  myth- 
ology of  the  Eddas.     Such  has  been  from  the  first  my  plan. 

What  the  first  era  of  Viking  conquest  had  done  we  know. 
It  had  destroyed  the  Irish  Church ;  it  had  reduced  the  central 
states  of  Christendom  almost  to  chaos.  To  contemporary  minds 
even  fears  which  seem  chimerical  to  us  were  possible  :  it  might 
have  seemed  not  impossible  that  the  heathens  were  about 
wholly  to  uproot  Christianity  in  Northern  Europe.  Such  a 
fear  did  exist.  And  it  was  not  fantastic  because  of  any  weak- 
ness in  the  arms  of  the  Northmen.  The  Vikings'  weakness 
lay  in  their  creed.  It  is  needful  for  us  to  bear  in  mind  that, 
while  with  visible  weapons  and  in  outward  battle  the  contest 
between  Heathendom  and  Christendom  resulted  altogether  in 
favour  of  the  heathens,  there  was  at  the  same  time  an  inward 
battle  going  on,  fought  with  invisible  weapons,  between 
Northern  Heathenism  and  Christianity,  which  resulted  in  a 
victory  not  less  decisive  for  the  latter. 

To  make  our  history  really  complete  it  would  be  necessary 
to  trace  the  steps  of  this  other  conflict ;  but  the  materials  for 
doing  so  are  wholly  denied  us. 

What  alone  is  not  denied  us  is  the  opportunity  of  measurgin 
in  some  degree  the  opposing  forces.  Half  the  means  for 
doing  this  we  have  already  supplied.  We  have  gathered 
together  all  that  seemed  most  impressive  and  most  likely  to  be 
permanent  in  the  old  Teutonic  religion.  It  remains  to  try  and 
gain  some  notion  of  the  antagonistic  belief — the  creed  of 
Christendom  during  the  ninth  century.  For  a  picture  of  this 
last  we  must  not  be  content  alone  with  our  general  knowledge 
of  Christianity,  not  even  with  our  general  knowledge  of  the 
Catholicism  of  the  Middle  Ages.     We  may  take  that  as  the 


$oo  THE  CREED  OF  CHRISTENDOM. 

groundwork  of  our  picture.  But  we  must  overlay  it  with  some 
details  which  are  peculiar  to  the  times  of  which  we  write,  some 
special  aspects  of  the  general  creed  of  Christendom  which  for 
this  period  occupied  the  most  men's  thoughts.  To  gaining  at 
least  a  hint  upon  these  the  present  chapter  is  applied. 

We  are  not,  be  it  understood,  concerned  either  with  the 
formal  decrees  of  councils,  or  with  the  abstract  speculations  of 
philosophers,  not  with  the  visions  of  the  spiritual,  nor  the 
fervent  aspirations  of  the  pious  in  themselves  :  only  with  the 
results  of  all  these  in  so  far  as  they  affected  men's  general 
outlook  over  the  world,  the  natural  and  supernatural  in  it  with 
which  they  came  in  contact  or  believed  that  they  came  in 
contact.  On  an  earlier  page  we  said  that  the  'creed  of  any 
age  is  only  the  sum  of  the  individual  opinions  of  that  age;' 
and  it  is  with  this  formula,  or  something  like  it,  as  our  guide, 
that  we  must  equip  ourselves  for  our  inquiry.  What  we  ask  is, 
What  was  at  this  moment  the  attitude  of  society  or  of  individuals 
towards  the  abstract  doctrines  of  Christendom ;  towards  the 
supernal  powers;  towards  what  were  deemed  their  visible  mani- 
festations ;  towards  sacraments,  relics,  miracles ;  what  their 
belief  in  a  future  state,  what  the  forms  in  which  that  belief 
was  expressed  ?  On  these  matters  we  ought  to  get  some 
notion  if  we  could — sufficient  at  any  rate  to  afford  us  an  idea 
of  the  weapons  by  which  Christianity  fought  against  the  rival 
claims  of  Heathendom. 


II. 

Yet  where  are  we  to  look  for  the  manifestations  of  our  Creed 
of  Christendom  during  the  ninth  century?  Truth  to  tell,  that 
creed  is  not  merely  not  uniform  over  all  parts  of  Europe,  but 
it  is  throughout  compounded  of  divers  elements  which  seem  to 
have  no  connection  with  each  other.     How  are  we  to  sift  and 


ROME  AND  THE  POPES.  501 

classify  these  parts  ?  How  are  we  to  name  them  ?  Let  us  try 
the  process  of  sifting  first ;  the  naming  may  be  left  to  follow. 

Turn  first  to  that  city  which  still  claimed  to  be  in  a  sense  the 
seat  of  empire — turn  first  to  that  turbulent,  ungovernable  city  by 
the  banks  of  the  Tiber,  to  a  population  which  will  not  work 
and  is  ashamed  to  beg;  unless  to  beg  like  a  brigand  with 
insolence  and  threats.  To  do  that  it  is  not  ashamed,  nor  to 
bribe  and  be  bribed,  to  steal,  to  lie,  to  murder ;  hae  tibi  sunt 
artes  now,  unhappy  Rome.  Yet  so  great  is  the  power  of  names, 
Rome  now  lived  on  proud  and  useless,  in  virtue  only  of  its 
inheritance  from  the  greatness  of  the  past.  There  is,  perhaps, 
nothing  more  wonderful  in  the  course  of  mediaeval  history  than 
the  continuance  of  this  corrupt  mass  in  the  very  centre  of  a  new 
society,  its  unchangeableness,  its  persistence  in  decay.  Nothing 
more  strange  than  this  sight,  nothing  more  unutterably  sad. 
Once  the  noblest  of  men  could  write:  'Think  each  moment 
steadily,  as  a  Roman  and  a  man,  to  do  what  thou  hast  in 
hand  with  perfect  and  simple  dignity  and  feeling  of  affection 
and  wisdom  and  justice;'  or  again,  'Let  the  God  which  is  within 
thee  be  guardian  of  a  living  being,  manly  and  of  ripe  age  and 
engaged  in  state  affairs,  and  a  Roman  and  a  ruler,  who  has 
taken  his  post  like  a  man  waiting  for  the  signal  which  summons 
him  from  life,  ready  to  go.'  And  the  spirit  which  gave 
utterance  to  such  thoughts  was,  as  it  felt,  above  all  else  the 
spirit  of  a  Roman.  Now  the  Roman  name  and  Roman  state 
were  in  themselves  the  home  and  symbol  of  corruption  of  all 
kinds.  Yet  with  this  present  decay  was  linked,  like  a  live  man 
to  a  corpse,  the  memory  and  the  idea  of  former  greatness. 

At  the  head  of  the  lawless  mob  of  the  capital  stood  the 
awful  personality  of  the  successor  of  St.  Peter,  whose  office  was  at 
once  the  sport  of  turbulent  factions  and  the  most  majestic  which 
the  consciences  of  mankind  confessed.  It  embodied  the  idea 
which  was  the  governing  one  throughout  the  Middle  Ages — the 


502  THE  CREED  OF  CHRISTENDOM. 

idea  of  a  theocracy.  That  idea  might  have,  however,  been 
differently  realized  :  it  might  have  been  diffused  throughout  the 
whole  body  of  the  Christian  Church  and  have  spoken  through 
her  councils.  For  Germans  it  might  have  been  embodied  in 
the  German  hierarchy;  for  Frenchmen,  for  the  men  of  the 
Western  Empire,  it  might  have  been  embodied  in  the  Gallican 
Church.  The  idea  of  the  theocracy  of  Christianity  was  a 
universal  and  a  popular  idea  common  to  high  and  low ; 
but  the  exact  shape  in  which  this  idea  was  to  be  shown  forth, 
that  I  cannot  believe  was  in  these  days  a  matter  of  great 
popular  concern.  It  was,  on  the  other  hand,  a  matter  of  the 
greatest  concern  to  the  representatives  of  the  Church  in  every 
land — to  the  higher  ecclesiastical  dignitaries.  The  question 
took  the  form  of  a  rivalry  between  the  Pope  on  the  one  side 
and  the  hierarchies  of  the  transalpine  countries  upon  the  other. 
So  far  as  regards  what  we  may  call  the  official  Christianity  of 
those  days — the  Church,  I  mean,  as  represented  by  her  chief 
officers — this  question  was  the  most  important  which  agitated 
men's  thoughts. 

The  question  became  complicated  with  another.  The  Pope, 
besides  being  the  claimant  of  supreme  autocratic  power  in 
ecclesiastical  affairs,  was  the  representative  of  a  definite  stream 
of  lay  policy,  the  policy  which  we  have  already  defined  as  that 
of  Italy  for  the  Italians  :  Italy  for  the  Italians  in  the  first 
instance — get  rid  first  of  all  those  barbarian  invaders  who,  in 
successive  streams,  have  overrun  our  sacred  land ;  but  when 
that  is  accomplished  we  have  a  further  ambition  which  we 
might  call  the  policy  of  all  Europe  for  Italy — in  other  words  the 
restoration  to  the  City  of  the  Tiber  of  something  of  her  ancient 
influence.  This  could  only  be  done  in  one  way:  by  transferring 
to  the  Pope,  as  Head  of  the  Church,  a  temporal  as  well  as  a 
spiritual  dominion.  So  much  had  the  love  of  empire  survived 
the  capacity  for  it  among  the  Romans, 


THE  COUNCIL  OF  FRANKFURT.  503 

This  ambition  had  one  salutary  effect.  It  obliged  the 
Romans  to  look  out  for  some  wearer  of  the  triple  crown  who 
should  not  be  too  unworthy  of  his  office.  And  amid  all  the 
corruption  and  faction  through  which  they  rose,  the  popes 
themselves  stood  up  far  superior,  for  the  most  part,  to  their 
surroundings.  This,  then,  was  the  environment  within  which 
moved  Official  Christianity  during  the  ninth  century,  or,  for  that 
matter,  during  many  centuries  following.  We  see  that  it  is  one 
aspect  of  the  contest  (of  which  the  Viking  troubles  are  another) 
between  the  Roman  and  the  Teuton.  We  have  now  to  see  the 
special  developments  which  this  rivalry  assumed  during  the 
period  with  which  we  are  dealing. 

We  may,  to  begin  with,  take  our  stand  at  one  of  the  most 
important  of  ecclesiastical  councils,  that  of  Frankfurt,  with 
which  the  eighth  century  drew  to  a  close.1 

The  Frankfurt  Council  assembled,  under  the  presidency  of 
Charlemagne,  to  discuss,  among  other  matters,  the 
question   of  image-worship.      How    the    Isaurian 
Emperor,  Leo  III.,  had  set  himself  against  the  worship  of  images 
against  all  use  of  images  in  the  service  of  the  Church,  needs 
not  be  said.     No  Puritan  Cromwell  was  more  zealous  in  the 
breaking  of  images  than  Leo  and  his  successors  of  the  icono- 
clastic faction.     The  spirit  which  opposed  him  was  the  spirit  of 
those  peoples  in  whom  the  traces  of  art  and  the  sentiment  of 
art  still  survived — nay,  we  may  say  that  the  sentiment  of  idolatry, 
or  call  it  anthropomorphic  polytheism,  survived  most  in  them, 
and  found  its  expression  in  the  worship  of  images.     It  was 
a  question  between  Christian  polytheism  and  the  monotheism, 
the  cold  monotheism,  of  Jews  and  Mohammedans.    And  in  all 
the  classical  lands  the  worshippers  of  images  formed  the  popular 

1  Mansi  xiii.  col.  863  sqq.,  Concilium  Francofordiensey  A.D.  794.  See 
also  Gfrorer,  GeschichU  der  Christlichen  Kirche,  book  jji.  chap.  9. 


504  THE  CREED  OF  CHRISTENDOM. 

party.  It  was  the  most  popular  section — the  most  violent  and 
democratic  section — of  the  Eastern  Church  which  stood  up  and 
defied  the  emperor  ;  I  mean  the  monastic  body.  In  Italy  the 
popular  voice  was  on  the  same  side;  and  the  popes,  true  to 
their  popular  instincts,  pronounced  strongly  in  favour  of  the 
retention  of  images  in  churches.  Hadrian  I.  had  written  to 
the  turbulent  and  violent  Council  of  Constantinople,1  approving 
in  advance  the  decision  it  was  sure  to  come  to  in  favour  of 
image-worship. 

Not  so,  however,  thought  the  ecclesiastics  north  of  the  Alps. 
How  shall  we  account  for  this  difference?  It  has  been  the 
cust(  m  to  speak  of  image-worship  as  a  direct  outcome  of  the 
barbarian  invasions,  of  the  intermixture  of  barbarian  or  quasi- 
savage  elements  with  an  older  and  more  civilized  Christianity. 

Yet  if  this  were  the  case,  how  is  it  that  these  very  bar- 
barians, sitting  in  council  under  Charlemagne,  emphatically 
condemned  the  practice  of  worshipping  images  ?  The  Western 
Emperor  and  his  ecclesiastics  (to  whom  was  added,  moreover, 
a  contingent  of  English  bishops  2),  though  they  lent  no  support 
to  the  violent  acts  of  the  Emperor  of  the  East,  as  emphati- 
cally condemned  the  action  and  the  doctrine  of  the  not  less 
violent  council  of  Nicaea,  in  which  the  Iconoclast  party  was 
condemned;  and  by  implication,  the  letter  of  Hadrian,  in 
which  he  had  approved  the  decrees  of  that  council — a  council 
which  the  Roman  Church  has  ever  since,  on  Hadrian's 
authority,  held  to  be  cecumenical.3     Thus  condemned,  at  least 

1  More  commonly  called  the  Second  Council  of  Nice,  A.D.  787.  Tt 
was  held  under  Irene,  the  widow  of  Leo  IV.,  who  took  the  Catholic  side. 
For  the  acts  of  this  Council  see  Mansi,  xii.  col.  951— end,  xiii.  col.  1-819. 

a  See  Caroli  M.  ep.  ad  Elipandum  in  Mansi,  xiii.  col.  899  sqq.  _  It 
appears  that  Alcuin  wrote  a  special  treatise  against  image-worship.  Sim. 
Dun.  Gest.  Keg.  Ang.  quoted  by  Gfrorer,  o.c.  vol.  Hi-  p.  622. 

3  Gfrorer  (p.  574)  says  that  in  the  days  of  Pippin,  the  Pope  and  the 
Worshippers  of  Images  entertained  a  lively  fear  that  the  Franks  would 
support  Constantino  Copronymus. 


THE  PRANKISH  CHURCH  505 

by  implication,  Hadrian  yet  made  no  remonstrance  against  the 
decree  of  the  emperor  and  his  advisers.  There  are,  then,  two 
memorable  points  connected  with  the  Council  of  Frankfurt : 
first  the  light  which  it  throws  upon  the  relative  position  of  the 
popes  and  the  Frankish  clergy  (when  supported  by  the  emperor) 
at  the  end  of  the  eighth  century ;  secondly,  the  picture  it  gives 
us  of  the  doctrines  of  the  Frankish  ecclesiastics  on  the  subject 
of  this  Christian  polytheism,  which  was,  after  all,  one  of  the 
most  important  elements  in  the  Christianity  of  the  Middle 
Ages. 

I  say  of  the  Frankish  ecclesiastics.  It  is  not  necessary  to 
assume  that  the  constituents  of  the  Council  of  Frankfurt  gave 
expression  to  the  popular  belief  even  of  their  own  countries. 
They  were  for  the  most  part  men  of  the  dominant  race.  The 
popular  creed  was  in  the  hands  of  the  lower  clergy,  the  great 
majority  of  whom,  at  any  rate  in  the  western  division  of 
the  empire,  were  Roman-Celts,  not  Teutons.  I  surmise  that 
images  and  image-worship  appealed  very  little  to  the  religious 
instincts  of  the  ecclesiastics  of  German  descent.  Tacitus  tells 
us  that  the  heathen  Germans  did  not  have  idols  or  images  of 
the  gods  in  their  groves  ;  and  most  of  what  we  know  with 
regard  to  the  Scandinavian  creeds  tends  to  confirm  this  state- 
ment.1 

The  more  enlightened  among  the  members  of  the  Council 
of  Frankfurt  condemned  image-worship  from  the  standpoint  of 
a  spiritual  Christianity :  of  such  number  was  Agobard,  Arch- 
bishop of  Lyons.  But  even  those  who  did  not  rise  to  such  a 
height  condemned  it  because  they  were  out  of  sympathy  with 
this  particular  phase  of  polytheism.  They  had  no  artistic 
leanings.  The  fetichistic  forms  of  Christianity — the  worship 
of  relics,  of  bones,  of  staffs,   and  wallets,  appealed  more  to 

*  See  Corpus  Poeticutn  Borea/e,  i.  pp.  401-406. 


506  THE  CREED  OF  CHRISTENDOM. 

them  than  the  worship  of  images,  which  were  made  to  repre- 
sent a  personage,  and  were  not  as  a  rule  themselves  supposed 
to  be  possessed  of  magical  powers.  Lest  we  should  be  tempted 
to  interpret  the  decrees  of  the  Frankfurt  Council  in  a  sense  too 
favourable  to  the  Christianity  of  the  Teutons,  we  need  to  remind 
ourselves  of  the  many  examples  of  the  superstitious  reverence 
for  relics,  of  the  exploitation  which  the  same  people  carried  on 
of  all  the  holy  tombs  of  Italy,  the  rifling  from  them  of  the  relics 
of  the  saints,  in  order  to  enrich  themselves  and  their  own 
country  with  those  precious  amulets.1 

The  Council  of  Frankfurt  was  council  and  diet  in  one.  At 
it  the  lay  and  ecclesiastical  vassals  of  the  emperor  sat  side  by 
side,  Charlemagne  presiding.  A  change  had  been  passing  over 
the  personnel  of  the  greater  ecclesiastical  vassals  since  the 
House  of  Heristal  mounted  the  throne.  Time  had  been 
when  all  ranks  of  the  clergy,  high  and  low,  were  filled  by 
Roman-Celts.  More  and  more,  since  the  days  of  St.  Arnolf 
onwards,  had  Frankish  nobles  aspired  after  the  higher  Church 
dignities ;  and  now,  as  we  have  seen,  the  upper  ranks  of  the 
clergy  were  chiefly  Teutons.2 

The  conversion  of  Germany  had  recruited  the  ranks  of  the 
Teutonic  clergy  with  a  number  of  men  who  were  in  these  days 


1  Cf.  Einhard,  Historia  Trans.  B.B.  Marcellini  et  Petri  [Peter  Martyr], 
in  Migne,  t.  104 ;  and  ante,  p.  440. 

2  Gfrorer,  I.e.  p.  554,  by  the  rough  but  only  available  test  of  a  comparison 
of  names,  estimates  that,  while  in  the  first  half  of  the  sixth  century  the 
bishops  in  Frankland  were,  by  a  large  majority,  of  Roman-Celtic  origin,  by 
the  seventh  century  those  of  Frankish  origin  were  in  the  same  proportion 
in  excess  of  the  Roman- Celts.  This  is  in  apparent  contradiction  with  what 
was  said  above  in  Chapter  VIII.  (p.  194),  when  speaking  of  the  ecclesiastical 
influence  over  Lewis  the  Pious.  But  in  the  first  place  it  may  be  pleaded, 
what  Gfrorer  admits,  that  probably  many  of  the  ecclesiastics  who  bore 
German  names  were  of  Gaulish  origin  (Ebbo,  for  example,  who  is  said  to 
have  been  of  servile  origin,  and  whom,  when  writing  the  passage,  I  had 
specially  in  mind)  ;  and,  again,  that  the  numbers  of  the  lower  clergy  would 
insensibly  influence  the  politics  of  the  whole  ecclesiastical  body. 


GERMAN  ECCLESIASTICS.  507 

the  very  best  of  their  order.  Boniface  and  his  successors 
were  the  direct  heirs  of  the  Irish  monks  their  forerunners,  who 
a  century  earlier  had  tamed  the  spirits  of  the  lakes  and  moun- 
tains in  Swabia  and  Switzjrland.  The  change  had  been  from 
a  Celtic  to  a  Saxon  race  of  teachers.  The  ecclesiastics 
who  now  filled  the  chief  offices  of  the  Frankish  Church 
were  the  most  distinguished  men  of  their  day.  Most  of 
them  were  Germans.  Even  in  Italy  some  in  the  higher 
orders  in  the  Church  were  Franks.  It  would  be  difficult 
to  find  anywhere  greater  statesmen  than  Wala  of  Corbie, 
Ebbo  of  Rheims,  or  his  successor  Hincmar;  men  of  more 
accredited  piety  than  Benedict  of  Aniana,  or  Theodolf  of 
Orleans;  men  more  enlightened  and  spiritual  than  Agobard  of 
Lyons  ;  of  greater  learning  than  Hincmar,  or  than  Raban  x  of 
Mainz ;  of  more  zeal  and  courage  than  Anscar  of  Hamburg  or 
his  successor  Rimbert.  Under  the  guidance  and  inspiration  of 
these  men  the  transalpine  churches  grew  in  strength  and  con- 
fidence. 

By  the  Council  of  Frankfurt  the  German  ecclesiastics  cut 
themselves  off  from  the  barren  controversies  which  were  dis- 
tracting the  churches  of  the  East.  During  all  the  first  half  of 
the  ninth  century  they  gained  steadily  in  influence  over  state 
affairs.  In  the  time  of  Charlemagne  the  bishops  sat  along 
with  the  lay  vassals  to  deliberate  on  the  ordinary  affairs  of  the 
empire  ;  but  on  the  other  hand  (as  we  have  seen)  the  laity 
took  part  in  deliberations  which  were  purely  ecclesiastical  In 
the  da)s  of  Lewis  the  Pious,  while  the  clergy  still  sat  in  the 
diets,  the  placita,  questions  of  creed,  matters  such  as  that 
endless  controversy  over  the  single  and  double  nature  of  Christ, 
these  were  decided  by  the  Church  alone. 

1  Ebbo,  we  have  said,  was  very  likely  a  Gaul  by  descent  ;  Agobard  of 
Lyons  was  by  birth  a  Spaniard,  possibly  in  b.ood  a  Goth;  Raban 
Magnentiits  chimed  Roman  descent. 


5o8  THE  CREED  OF  CHRISTENDOM. 

Great  was  the  spiritual  power  of  the  Frankish  Church,  her 
force  of  attraction,  at  the  beginning  of  the  ninth  century. 
Charlemagne's  method  of  converting  the  Saxons  was  one  which 
has  not  been  often  fruitful  in  great  results,  though  it  has  been 
tried  often  enough.  But  the  attractive  forces  of  Christianity 
survived  even  that.  The  ghosts  of  the  four  thousand  five 
hundred  prisoners  massacred  at  Verden  on  the  Aller,  of  the 
thousands  more  who  had  fallen  by  the  side  of  Widukind  or 
among  the  ashes  of  their  homesteads,  did  not  rise  up  and  forbid 
the  Saxons  from  deserting  their  ancient  shrinks.  They  did  not 
prevent  the  erection,  upon  the  very  sites  of  former  battles  or  in 
the  places  sacred  to  the  old  creed,  of  those  new  strongholds  of 
Christianity,  bishoprics  and  abbeys,  which  before  long  were 
firmly  fixed  all  over  the  conquered  country — at  Verden  itself,  at 
Seligenstad,  at  Bremen,  at  Miinster,  at  Osnahurg,  Paderborn, 
Herford,  Hertzfeld,  Halberstatt,  Hildesheim,  Corvey,  Hamburg. 
During  Charles's  reign,  or  the  next,  all  these  sees  and  abbeys 
were  founded ;  and  they  remained  and  made  converts. 

True,  there  was  for  some  time  a  party  in  Saxony  which  looked 
back  with  regret  to  the  old  heathen  days  and  days  of  indepen- 
dence, and  hoped  at  some  time  to  restore  them.  But  on  the 
other  hand,  among  the  majority  of  the  Saxon  people,  great  and 
small,  during  the  ninth  century,  we  should  find  more  piety — as 
piety  was  understood  in  those  days — more  zeal  in  making 
religious  endowments,  more  attachment  to  Christianity  and  the 
Church,  than  in  almost  any  other  part  of  the  empire.  No 
family  produced  more  saints,1  or  raised  more  churches,  and 
endowed  more  monasteries,2  than  the  great  Sa^on  house  from 
which  Liudolf  and  Cobbo  sprang.  And  it  was  Saxony  which, 
during  this  century,  gave  birth  to  that  great  epic  poem  now 
known   as    Heliand  (The   Saviour),    the  counterpart  for   Old 

1  E.g.  St.  Hathumod  ;  or  Addila  and  Hathemy,  Abbess.s  of  Herford. 
8  Herford  was  the  most  important  anong  these  ;  Gandersheim  another. 


THE  CHURCH  IN  SAXONY,  509 

Saxony  to  our  poems  of  Caedmon;  the  longest  vernacular 
religious  poem  which  was  produced  in  Germany  for  many 
centuries. 

When  the  German  populations  had  been  brought  over,  there 
were  fresh  fields  for  the  proselytizing  zeal  of  the  Frankish 
Church;  first  among  Slavonic  nationalities  which  lay  upon 
her  eastern  borders,  and  next  among  the  Scandinavians.  As 
we  have  paitly  seen,  in  the  days  of  Lewis  the  Pious  all  hopes 
seemed  to  point  towards  easy  and  bloodless  conversions  in 
these  regions  also. 

As  for  the  Slavs,  many  of  them  had  long  been  Christians 
The  Bavarian  Church  first,  subsequently  missionaries  sent  directly 
by  the  Pope,  Nicholas  I.,  had  done  wonders  among  them. 
The  Duke  of  the  Pannonian  Slavs,  under  Lewis  the  German, 
Pribina  by  name,  sent  to  Salzburg  for  missionaries  to  teach  the 
more  ignorant  of  his  people,  and  himself  dedicated  numerous 
churches  in  his  capital,  Mosaburg.  The  Duke  of  Moravia,  on 
the  other  hand,  always  jealous  of  the  Frankish  Empire,  and  all 
that  belonged  to  it,  sent  an  embassy  to  Constantinople  with 
requests  similar  to  those  made  by  Pribina ;  and  thus  a  rivalry 
of  influence  was  begun  between  the  churches  of  the  west  and 
the  east  among  the  Southern  Slavs,  which  has  lasted  to 
our  days. 

In  answer  to  the  request  of  Rastislas  two  missionaries — two 
brothers — v\ere  despatched,  whose  names,  Constantine  x  and 
Methodius,  are  famous  for  the  conversion  of  Slavonic  nation- 
alities. To  them  the  Slavs  owe,  among  other  gifts,  the  existing 
Slavonic  alphabet ;  which  is,  it  must  be  confessed,  after  all,  a 
gift  of  doubtful  advantage.     For  had  the  Russians  and  Poles 

1  Or  Cyril,  the  name  urder  which  he  was  canonized  ;  whence  the  alpha- 
bet introduced  by  him  is  known  as  the  Cyrillian  alphabet.  It  was  not  the 
first  alphabet  known  to  any  o  the  Slav  nan'onalities,  but  partly  an  adap- 
ta:ion  and  improvement  ol  earlier  and  ruder  forms. 


jto  THE  CREED  OF  CHRISTENDOM. 

and  other  Slavs  been  compelled  to  use  the  Roman  alphabet, 
ihere  can  be  no  doubt  that  their  languages  would  be  better 
known  in  Western  Europe  than  they  are  to  day,  and  much 
of  the  ill-feeling  which  exists  between  Slav  and  Teuton  might 
have  given  way  before  a  better  mutual  understanding.  The 
mission  of  these  two  brothers  in  Moravia  extends  over  the 
years  864-867.  Of  the  contest  between  Catholic  and  Orthodox 
interests  following  this  invasion  of  a  country  which  formed  as 
yet  a  part  of  the  Western  Church,  we  need  not  here  speak. 
Let  us  note,  however,  that  these  conversions  of  the  Slavs  were 
confined  to  those  who  inhabited  the  centre  and  south  of  the 
Slavonic  region.  The  Abodriti  on  the  Baltic  coast,  like  their 
neighbours  the  Danes,  remained  unconverted,  and  the  work  of 
extending  Christianity  to  the  Slavonian  nationalities  on  the 
Baltic  was  reserved  for  a  later  century. 

III. 

It  was  hardly  consistent  with  the  character  of  human  things 
that  the  bright  prospects  which  the  early  years  of  the  ninth 
century  opened  out  should  continue.  The  proselytizing  spirit 
of  the  Frankish  Church  beat  vainly  against  the  stubborn  in- 
difference of  the  Northmen.  And  here,  as  in  all  other  cases, 
to  fail  in  making  conquests  abroad  was  to  lose  credit  and  power 
at  home. 

A  rival  power  to  that  of  the  Frankish  Church  had  in  the 
meanwhile  been  growing  up  be>  ond  the  Alps — the  power  of  the 
popes.  The  ecclesiastical  history  of  the  second  portion  of  the 
ninth  century  is  the  history  of  the  efforts — successful  for  the 
most  part — which  the  popes  were  making,  first  to  deliver  them- 
selves irom  the  patronage  of  the  emperors ;  next  to  wrest  from 
the  Frankish  Church  half  its  power,  and  to  bring  it  into  obedi- 
ence to  the  Papal  See. 

Go  back  once  more  to  the  Iconoclastic  controversy.     The 


DEC  A  Y  OF  THE  FRANK  IS  H  CHURCH.  $n 

upshot  of  it  and  of  the  action  of  the  popes  therein  was  that  the 
latter  withdrew  from  the  condition  of  dependence  upon  the 
Eastern  emperors,  denied  the  right  of  these  to  put  a  veto  upon 
their  election.  Thus  they  severed  (finally,  as  it  proved)  the 
connection  between  the  Eastern  and  Western  Churches.  But 
that  obedience  which  they  withdrew  from  the  Eastern  Empire 
they  gave  to  the  Western.  The  popes  were  not  yet  strong 
enough  to  stand  alone.  And  though  the  Council  of  Frank- 
furt did  not  support  the  doctrine  of  Hadrian  on  the  subject 
of  image-worship,  Charlemagne  did  support  the  Pope  in  the 
action  which  rose  out  of  the  doctrine.  Henceforward  the 
election  of  the  Pope  had  to  be  confirmed  by  the  Western 
Emperor. 

It  could  not  take  place  save  in  the  presence  of  the  imperial 
envoy.  At  the  same  time  we  note  that  on  that  great  Christmas 
Day  of  a.d.  800,  when  the  Western  Empire  first  came  into 
existence,  it  was  the  Pope  who  placed  the  diadem  upon  the 
head  of  Charles,  whereby  the  Papal  See  acquired  an  undefined 
and  shadowy  claim  to  give  the  final  sanction  to,  or,  if  need  be, 
the  veto  upon,  the  succession  of  these  emperors  of  the  west. 
These  two  claims,  the  claim  of  imperial  sanction  for  election  to 
the  papacy,  the  claim  of  papal  sanction  for  election  to  the 
empire — the  one  definite  and  legal,  the  other  shadowy  indeed, 
but  resting  upon  the  universal  theocratic  sentiment  of  the 
Middle  Ages — these  we  know  were  the  two  great  questions 
round  which  the  history  of  the  Church,  nay,  all  mediaeval 
history,  were  to  revolve  for  many  centuries.  One  triumphed 
under  Otto  the  Great  in  Rome,  in  a.d.  963  ;  the  other 
triumphed  under  Gregory  the  Great  at  Canossa,  in  a.d.  1077. 
We  have  not  to  sptak  of  this  contest  as  a  whole,  only  of  the 
steps  which  during  the  ninth  century  it  made  towards  ripening. 

Lewis  the  Pious  determined  more  exactly  than  his  predeces- 
sors had  done  the  constitution  for  the  election  of  the  popes, 


5i2  THE  CREED  OF  CHRISTENDOM. 

and  in  that  constitution  the  right  of  imperial  veto  was  most 
expressly  reserved.  Nor  had  it  been  ever  called  in  question 
by  the  popes  who  were  chosen  during  the  earlier  years  of  this 
reign,  by  Paschal  I.,  by  Eugenius  II.,  or  Valentine.1  But  when 
the  rebellion  of  the  sons  of  Lewis  broke  out,  we  have  seen  how 
the  Pope  began  to  intermeddle  in  the  matter ;  how  the  new 
policy  of  the  Papal  See,  the  policy  of  setting  the  King  of  Italy 
into  opposition  to  the  transalpine  emperor  and  of  founding 
papal  independence  on  the  strength  of  the  national  feeling, 
had  its  dawning.  We  have  seen  how  successfully  the  policy 
was  carried  on  during  the  reign  of  Lothair  I.,  who  forfeited  all 
power  in  Italy,  and  never  ventured,  after  his  first  attempt  at  the 
election  of  Sergius  II.,  to  interfere  in  the  choice  of  the  popes. 
Then  it  was  that  sometimes  the  corrupt  and  factious  spirit  of 
the  Romans  broke  loose,  and  brought  scandal  upon  the  papal 
elections.2  But  on  the  whole  the  choices  were  well  made. 
Finally,  after  the  middle  of  the  century,  when  one  and  all  of 
the  Frankish  sovereigns  had  lost  hugely  in  power  and  prestige, 
a  great  man  was  raised  to  the  papal  chair,  under  whom  it 
seemed  that  all  the  controversies  between  the  popes  and  the 
emperor,  or  between  the  rival  churches  of  the  west,  would  be 
settled  in  favour  of  Rome. 

One  half  of  that  for  which  the  popes  had  striven,  the  separa- 
tion of  Italy  from  the  empire,  had  already  been  attained  before 
Nicholas  I.  mounted  the  papal  throne.  Long  before  his 
retirement,  Lothair  I.  had  lost  all  power  in  Italy;  the  next 
emperor,  Lewis  II.,  had  none  on  this  side  of  the  Alps.  All  the 
energies  of  Lewis,  and  they  were  great,  were  at  the  service  of 
the  peninsula :    they  were   constantly  called  into  requisition 

1  Albeit   the  Romans  sought  to  evade  the  law;  cf.  Gfrorer,  o.c.  p.  728 
sqq. 

2  The  myth  of  Pope  Joan  belongs  to  this  period.      Even  as  a  myth  it  has 
a  certain  significance. 


DEC  A  Y  OF  THE  FRANKS  H  CHURCH.  513 

against  the  foes  of  his  Italian  kingdom,  most  of  all  against  the 
terrible  scourge  of  the  Saracenic  invasion.  The  rival  powers  of 
Pope  and  Emperor  were  not  seldom  arrayed  against  each  other ; 
but  this  emperor  could  look  for  no  support  from  beyond  the 
Alps.  The  Pope  need  fear  the  influence  of  no  rival  church  in 
his  own  country  supporting  the  emperor  with  its  ghostly 
authority,  as  in  the  days  of  the  Fiankfurt  Council  long  ago. 
But  Nicholas  was  not  content  with  this  immunity  at  home; 
he  desired  to  carry  the  victory  into  other  countries — above  all, 
to  make  the  supreme  authority  of  the  popes  felt  and  acknow- 
ledged by  the  transalpine  churches.  The  means  by  which  he 
carried  out  his  purpose  opened  a  new  era  in  ecclesiastical 
history. 

Had  the  Frankish  Church  remained  as  much  one  body  as  it 
was  in  the  days  of  Charlemagne,  and  held  its  own  head  as  high, 
great  difficulties  would  have  lain  in  Nicholas's  path.  The 
proud  ecclesiastics  of  the  conquering  German  race  were  not 
likely  to  submit  without  a  struggle  to  the  dictation  of  a  Roman. 

As  might  be  guessed,  after  the  breaking  out  of  the  civil 
war,  the  Church  of  Francia  did  not  retain  the  same  high 
position  that  it  held  before.  The  part  which  many  of  the 
Frankish  ecclesiastics  took  against  Lewis  the  Pious  was  the 
first  act  which  lowered  the  estimation  of  their  order :  and 
though  the  Pope  of  those  days  shared  in  their  action,  it  was 
left  to  them  to  bear  the  chief  part  in  the  disgrace  of  it.  What- 
ever justification  might  be  discoverable  for  the  course  they 
took,  the  sight  of  the  penittnt  dethroned  monarch  struck  a 
chord  of  popular  sympathy,  and  the  vox  populi  condemned  one 
and  all  of  his  persecutors,  Agobard  and  Wala  as  much  as 
Lothair  or  Matfrid. 

The  Viking  raids  in  their  turn,  by  impoverishing  the  Church, 
by  shaking  men's  faith  in  the  supernatural  powers,  worked  in 

34 


5H  THE  CREED  OF  CHRISTENDOM. 

the  same  direction.  During  the  civil  wars,  moreover,  eccle- 
siastics who  mixed  themselves  up  in  state  affairs  were  deprived 
of  their  sees  or  abbeys  with  as  little  scruple  as  the  lay  vassals 
were  deprived  of  their  fiefs.  More  and  more  the  practice 
obtained  of  granting  to  laymen  the  revenues  of  religious 
foundations,1  or  creating  the  order  of  lay  abbots  such  as 
Robert  the  Strong,  or  Hukbert  of  St.  Maurice,  or  Hugo  of 
Tours — a  practice  always  execrated  by  the  clergy,  whose 
visionaries  had  seen  Charles  Martel,  the  champion  of  Christen- 
dom against  the  Moors,  burning  in  hell  for  a  no  worse  offence ; 
but  a  practice  put  in  use  even  by  the  pious  Levis  himself,  and 
viewed  with  more  and  more  indifference  by  the  people,  the 
more  they  felt  a  debt  of  gratitude  to  the  champions  who  were 
their  best  defence  against  the  Northmen. 

In  these  circumstances  certain  zealous  churchmen — precisely 

_    ,  who  will  never  be  known — hit  upon  a  device 

A.D.  circ.  836-840.     r  .  ,  ,  r      .r  .  ,        , 

for,  as  they  thought,  refortifying  the  threat- 
ened power  and  influence  of  their  Church.  The  device  was  a 
simple  one ;  merely  the  forgery,  and  then  the  supposed  dis- 
covery of  a  series  of  decretals  (decrees)  of  the  earliest  popes — 
decrees  professedly  dating  back  much  farther  than  any  of  the 
authentic  decrees  hitherto  known. 

The  Church  did  already  possess  a  collection  of  authentic 
decretals,  known  as  the  collection  of  Dionysius.  But  this 
began  no  earlier  than  the  beginning  of  the  fifth  century.  There 
was  also  a  collection  of  the  decrees  of  councils  known  as  the 
collection  of  Isidore  of  Seville.  Among  these,  one  (a  decree 
of  the  council  of  Sardica)  was  to  the  effect  that  the  personal 
decrees  of  the  early  popes — judgments  pronounced  in  their 
letters — were  to  be  considered  binding  upon  the  Church — the 

1  At  the  same  time  that  the  Vikings  were  relieving  the  monasteries  of 
their  personalty,  the  monarchs  all  oxer  Western  Christendom  were  in  this 
w.se  ru-  ieving  them  of  their  leally. 


THE  FALSE  DECRETALS,  51? 

decretals  of  the  early  popes  equal  to  the  decrees  of  councils. 
But  the  decretals  of  the  earliest  popes — where  were  they  ?  They 
had  never  yet  been  discovered.  It  seemed  a  happy  thought 
of  some  among  the  ecclesiastics  of  Mainz  or  Rheims,  or  where- 
soever the  forgeries  came  from,1  to  make  up  the  missing 
documents,  or  a  sufficient  collection  of  them.  They  fathered 
them  upon  the  same  Isidore  of  Seville,  who  had  handed  down 
the  decrees  of  the  early  councils;  and  the  collection  which  they 
published,  and  which  is  famous  in  the  ecclesiastical  history  of 
these  days,  is  known  as  that  of  the  '  False  Decretals,'  or  the 
'  Decretals  of  the  Pseudo-Isidore.' 

This  spurious  collection  professed  to  contain  among  other 
things  the  original  deed  of  the  famous  donation  of  Constantine 
to  Pope  Silvester,  in  which  began  the  temporal  power  of  the 
popes,  and  which,  in  the  view  of  the  wisest  of  Catholics,  had 
wrought  such  evil  in  the  Church  : — 

Fatto  v'avete  Dio  d'oro  e  d'argento  : 

E  che  altro  e  da  voi  agl'  idolatre, 
Se  non  ch'egli  uno,  e  voi  n'orate  cento? 

Ahi  !  Costantin,  di  quanto  mal  fu  madre 
Non  la  tua  conversion,  ma  quella  dote, 

Che  da  te  prese  il  primo  ricco  padre. 

It  was  scarcely  in  the  power  of  the  forgers,  having  made  this 
appeal  to  antiquity,  to  rest  it  upon  any  other  basis  than  the 
papal  power.  The  object  of  the  new  decretals  was  to  free  the 
Church,  wherever  found,  from  the  control  of  the  laity:  to  all 
this  the  forged  decrees  tended.  But  it  could  not  reserve  this 
power  to  any  one  Church  at  that  moment  existing.  Where  in 
the  fourth  century  and  earlier  had  been  the  Church  of  the 
Franks,  whose  great  ecclesiastics  now  formed  a  powerful  bar- 

1  There  can  be  little  doubt  that  the  False  Decretals  proceeded  eithet 
from  Mainz  or  Rheims.  Gfrorer  [I.e.  p.  790)  pronounces  for  the  former, 
DLimmler  [Ostf.  Keich.  i.  222)  for  the  latter. 


516  THE  CREED  OF  CHRISTENDOM. 

barian  phalanx  round  the  imperial  throne?1  Beside,  these 
forgers  were  not  themselves  members  of  this  greater  hierarchy. 
They  were  not  eager  to  secure  the  pre-eminence  of  the  metro- 
politan archbishop  who  ranked  with  the  greatest  vassals  of  the 
empire,  and  who  lorded  it  over  the  lesser  bishops.  Add  the 
eternal  influence  of  the  feeling  omne  ignotum  pro  magnifico,  the 
tendency  of  men  to  avoid  the  evils  which  they  know,  and  fly  to 
others  which  they  know  not  of,  and  we  have  the  explanation  of 
the  fact,  strange  at  first  sight,  that  the  effect  of  this  piece  of 
Frankish  or  German  workmanship  was  enormously  to  augment 
the  power  of  the  Pope,  and  therefore  of  the  Ultramontane 
Church.  Some  of  the  supposititious  decrees  directly  asserted, 
and  all  of  them  implied,  a  right  of  appeal  for  any  bishop  from 
his  metropolitan  to  the  Pope. 

But  these  were  not  the  provisions  of  the  False  Decretals 
which  were  first  noticed  and  put  into  use.  All  manner  of 
questions,  moral  as  well  as  ecclesiastical,  were  treated  in  them  ; 
and  the  burning  question  of  the  day,  the  alienation  of  Church 
benefices,  was  not  left  out.  No  student  of  Church  history  in 
the  present  day  could  be  deceived  by  these  forgeries,  unless 
he  were  wilfully  blind.  It  is  difficult  to  believe  that  the  more 
learned  ecclesiastics  of  that  day  did  not  detect  the  fraud.  But 
it  fell  in  so  pat  with  their  wishes,  just  at  the  time  when  they 
were  sharpening  all  their  weapons  for  an  attack  upon  the  lay 
vassals  small  and  great.  Here  were  decrees  against  the 
alienation  of  Church  lands  as  fitting  as  if  they  had  been  written 
in  the  ninth  century  (which  they  were)  instead  of  the  second 
or  third.  Here  was  a  protecting  power  for  the  cloth  against 
the  violence  of  the  laity.  The  awful  power  of  St.  Peter  and  his 
keys,  an  appeal  to  which  men  had  before  only  thought  of  as  a 
vague  possibility,  now  took  visible  presence  in  their  imaginations 

1  I  include  in  the  expression  'imperial  throne'  that  power  which,  aftei 
A.D.  S43,  the  sons  of  Lewis  the  Pious  affected  to  wield  conjointly. 


NICHOLAS  I.  517 

Thus  it  fell  out  that  one  after  another  the  great  ecclesiastics 
(who  ought  to  have  known,  who  did  know,  better)  accepted 
and  used  the  spurious  decrees.  Hincmar  hailed  them  with 
delight.  Before  long  he  was  hoist  with  his  own  petard.  Up 
to  a.d.  861  he  had  been  upon  the  side  of  the  Pope.  They 
both  championed  the   cause  of   Lothair's  injured 

.r      r™  •     i  .       .      x       .       .       .  ,.  J  A.D.  861-865. 

wile,  Ihietberga,  in  the  Lothanngian  divorce  ques- 
tion. But  in  a.d.  861  Hincmar  deposed  one  of  his  suffragans, 
Bishop  Rothad  of  Soissons.  Next  year  Rothad  brought  his 
case  to  Rome  and  appealed  to  the  Pope.  In  that  Nicholas 
really  knew  nothing  of  the  rights  or  wrongs  of  the  obstinate 
old  man,  he  might,  without  loss  of  dignity,  have  easily  and 
probably  justly  confirmed  the  decision  of  Hincmar ;  and,  with- 
out measuring  swords  with  the  greatest  Frankish  ecclesiastic, 
might  still  have  established  a  precedent  for  the  right  of  appeal. 
But  Nicholas  knew  not  fear,  and  he  despised  compromise. 
What  if  he  were  at  this  moment  at  war  with  the  Patriarch  of 
Constantinople  and  with  the  Church  of  Lotharingia?  Here 
was  an  opportunity  of  forcing  his  yoke  on  the  neck  of  the 
greatest  and  proudest  prelate  of  the  day.  Hincmar  stood 
above  all  the  other  metropolitans  of  Francia.  Pie  had 
obtained  certain  ceremonial  privileges  for  his  archbishopric  of 
Rheims  which  seemed  to  place  his  See  almost  on  a  level  with 
the  chair  of  Peter.  Wherefore  Nicholas  at  once  took  up  the 
cause  of  Rothad.  It  seems  to  have  been  just  at  the  time  of 
the  Bishop  of  Soisson's  appeal  that  the  false  decretals  first 
came  into  the  hands  of  the  Pope  :  possibly  Rothad  himself 
brought  them.  They  furnished  him  with  a  crushing  weapon 
against  his  adversary.  Hincmar  now  sought  to  question  their 
genuineness.  But  it  was  too  late,  for  he  had  already  made  use 
of  them  to  further  purposes  of  his  own.  And  though  the 
battle  was  long,  to  the  Pope  fell  the  victory  in  the  end.  He 
despatched  a  legate  into  France,  who  compelled  the  reluctant 


518  THE  CREED  OF  CHRISTENDOM. 

submission    of    Hincmar    and     reinstated     Rothad     in    his 
bishopric.1 

IV. 

In  the  meantime  arose  that  great  divorce  case  of  Lothair  II. 
and  Thietberga  to  which  we  have  often  made  reference.2  The 
case  stood  thus.  Lothair  the  Elder,  though  he  ended  his  life 
in  a  monastery,  had  not  shown  himself  in  the  years  of  his  reign 
a  great  upholder  of  Christian  morals.  He  had  permitted  his 
sons  to  take  to  themselves  mistresses  and  live  with  them 
openly.  The  eldest  son,  Lothair  (II.),  had  in  this  manner 
connected  himself  with  Waldrada,  a  lady  of  birth.  He  con- 
tended afterwards  that  not  his  father  only,  but  his  mother,  had 
sanctioned  the  connection,  with  the  express  object  of  restrain- 
ing him  from  vice,  and  that  by  his  mother's  wish  the  connection 
had  been  made  lawful  by  marriage.  To  affirm  so  much  was 
to  confess  to  bigamy ;  for  after  Lothair  came  to  the  throne  he 
married  Thietberga,  a  lady  with  powerful  connections.  Her 
eldest  brother  was  Hukbert,  the  lay  abbot  of  St.  Maurice  in 
the  Alps.  Lothair  alleged  that  he  had  been  forced  into  the 
marriage  with  Thietberga  by  her  brothers.  He  also,  when 
still  harder  pressed  for  reasons  for  a  divorce,  trumped  up  a 
story  of  her  having  before  her  marriage  committed  incest  with 
her  brother. 

In  fact,  Lothair  had  no  child  by  her.  But  he  had  a  son  and 
a  daughter  by  Waldrada — the  son,  that  Hugo  of  Lorraine 
whose  rebellion  and  death  we  narrated  in  a  previous  chapter  ; 
the  daughter,  Gisla  or  Gisella,  who  married  Godfred  the 
Dane.  The  reason  of  Lothair's  strenuous  endeavours  to  gain 
a  divorce  from  Thietberga  and  licence  to  marry  Waldrada  may 

1  The  controversy  can  be  followed  in  Migne  t.  119,  cols.  821-39,  860-3, 
871,  890-911,  1094-1114. 

a  Nicholas  I.'s  briefs,  &c,  on  the  case  of  Lothair  and  Thietberga  in 
Migne  t.  119,  cols.  796-803,  869-70,  881,  915-25,  971,  1 136-51,  1161-80. 


NICHOLAS  AND  THE  LOTHARINGIAN  CHURCH.   519 

be  supposed  to  lie  chiefly  in  his  desire  to  legitimize  his 
children.  Whatever  the  merits  of  the  case  might  have  been, 
there  can  be  no  question  that  in  earlier  days  a  demand  like 
that  of  Lothair's  would  have  been  granted.  That  the  marriage 
with  Thietberga  had  been  barren — that  alone  would  in  earlier 
days  have  been  ground  sufficient  for  its  dissolution.  No  Pope, 
a  few  of  the  Frankish  clergy  only,  had  protested  against  Charle- 
magne's action  in  divorcing  the  Lombard  Princess  Desiderata, 
which  was  defended  upon  no  better  plea.  But  the  severe  life 
of  Lewis  the  Pious  had  changed  men's  and  priests'  views  on 
moral  questions.  Nicholas  I.  found  in  the  scandal  of  Lothair's 
proceedings  a  golden  opportunity  for  humiliating  one  section 
of  the  clergy  and  one  of  the  sovereigns  of  the  Frankish 
empire.  And  he  was  so  clearly  in  the  right,  the  corrupt 
Lotharingian  prelates,  Giinther  of  Cologne,  Thietgaud  of 
Treves,  were  so  clearly  in  the  wrong,  that  the  best  of  the 
Frankish  clergy  on  every  side  supported  the  acts  of  Nicholas. 
Hincmar,  who  would  have  given  much  for  a  good  excuse  for 
humiliating  the  Pope,  yet  went  with  him  to  the  end  in  this 
matter. 

In  this  case  of  the  Thietberga  divorce  Nicholas  came  into 
direct  collision  with  the  ecclesiastics  of  Lothair's  kingdom 
assembled  in  council.  Lothair  had  not  acted  without  the 
sanction  of  his  clergy.  In  two  successive  synods  assembled  at 
Aix,  in  860  and  862,  the  kins:  had  obtained  first  .  „ 

'  5  A.D.  860,  862. 

a  separation  and  then  a  formal  divorce  from 
Thietberga,  in  virtue  of  a  confession  (wrung  from  her,  it  may 
be  supposed,  by  threats)  of  incestuous  intercourse  with  her 
own  brother  previously  to  her  marriage  with  Lothair.  But 
after  this  decree  the  queen  made  an  appeal  to  the  Pope, 
revoking  her  former  confession,  which  she  declared  to  have 
been  forced  from  her  under  fear  of  death.  Even  before 
Nicholas  had  mingled  in  the  matter,  Hincmar  of  Rheims  had 


52o  THE  CREED  OF  CHRISTENDOM. 

denounced    the    unjust    judgment    of    the    synod.       In    863 
Nicholas  dispatched  legates  to  inquire  into  the  cause. 

The  representatives  were  not  well  chosen :  one  Rhadwald 
had  already  been  sent  to  Constantinople  upon  a 

A.D.  863.  .   , 

matter  of  much  greater  moment  than  Lothair  s 
marriage  question,  which,  however,  must  not  concern  us  here. 
He  had  been  gained  over  by  one  party,  and  had  reported  con- 
trary to  justice  and  evidence.  Lothair,  in  the  meantime, 
considering  the  question  settled  by  the  decr.ee  of  the  Aix 
synod,  was  about  to  celebrate  his  marriage  with  Waldrada. 
Nicholas  threatened  him  with  excommunication  if  he  did  not 
wait  for  the  papal  decree.  Thus  the  gauntlet  was  thrown 
down  by  the  Pope  :  the  cause  which  the  Aix  synod  had 
decided,  the  Pope  decreed  was  to  be  re-heard  in  the  presence 
of  his  legates.  Still,  we  observe,  he  had  not  yet  summoned 
the  case  for  hearing  at  Rome.  Up  to  this  point  the  Lotharin- 
gian  Church  gave  way.  A  fresh  synod  was  summoned  at 
Metz ;  the  papal  legates  were  bought  over,  and  the  judgment 
of  the  synod  of  Aix  was  confirmed. 

One  might  almost  imagine  that  Nicholas  purposely  chose 
these  compliant  legates,  so  well  did  their  conduct  (as  it  proved) 
subserve  his  nearest  desires.  No  doubt  he  was  kept  well 
informed  by  Hincmar,  by  the  numerous  adherents  of  the 
Tnietberga  party,  of  the  brief  (if  I  may  use  the  word)  for  the 
defence.  Finally,  he  decided  to  re-hear  and  re-judge  the  case 
himself,  and  to  reverse,  if  there  should  prove  to  be  need,  the 
decisions  of  the  two  Frankish  councils.  He  did  not,  however, 
proceed  quite  openly  to  his  designs.  Giinther  and  Thietgaud 
had  been  despatched  to  convey  to  Nicholas  the  decree  of  the 
synod  of  Metz.  They  arrived  at  Rome  and  were  well  received. 
But  in  three  weeks  they  were  summoned  to  attend 
a  council  at  the  Lateran.  There  the  Pope  made 
known  the  results  of  hic    inquiries    into    the  conduct  of   his 


JUDGMENT  ON  LOTH  AIR,  521 

legates  and  into  the  decrees  of  the  Metz  synod.  And  terrible 
was  that  judgment,  which  fell  like  a  thunderbolt  upon  the 
two  archbishops,  upon  the  papal  legates,  upon  Lothair  and  the 
Lotharingian  Church. 

The  synod  of  Metz  should  not  be  called  a  synod,  but,  like 
the  robber  council  at  Ephesus,  be  anathema  for  all  time,  a 
brothel,  not  a  council  of  the  Church.  Giinther  and  Thietgaud 
were  excommunicated.  This  was  the  second  great  victory 
gained  by  the  papal  chair,  second  in  importance  only  to  those 
victories  gained  over  Hincmar  and  the  other  Gallican  bishops 
upon  the  question  of  appeals  to  Rome.  These  form  the  two 
great  events  in  the  history  of  what  I  have  called  the  Official 
Christianity  of  those  days,  of  what  would  be  called  in  a  more 
pretentious  way  the  history  of  the  Church. 

And  it  was  the  better  for  the  prestige  of  St.  Peter  that  the 
course  which  Nicholas  had  taken  seemed  to  receive  a  posthu- 
mous justification  by  a  direct  judgment  of  the  Almighty 
Lothair,  though  he  pretended  to  bow  to  the  papal  decree 
never  lost  the  hope  of  reversing  it ;  and  his  hopes  revived 
when  the  greatest  of  the  popes  since  Gregory  the  Great,  and, 
perhaps  (if  we  may  use  the  Miltonic  phrase),  the  greatest  ol 
his  successors  till  Gregory  VII.,  was  laid  in  his  tomb. 
Nicholas  I.  died  in  867,  occupied  to  the  very  last  with  this 
great  cause.1  His  successor,  Hadrian  II.,  seemed  less  severe.2 
He  took  off  the  sentence  of  excommunication  from  the  Bishops 
of  Cologne  and  Treves.  In  truth,  the  Pope  could  not  but 
wish  to  stand  well  with  Lewis  the  Emperor,  who  was  at  this 
moment  putting  forth  all  his  might  against  the  Saracen ;  and 
Lewis  espoused  the  cause  of  his  brother.     Buoyed  up  by  his 

*  Cf.  Migne,  119,  col.  11S0. 

2  In  fact,  the  ecclesiastics  of  France  and  Germany  were  so  afraid  lest  he 
should  go  back  upon  the  decrees  of  his  predecessor  that  they  addressed 
letters  urging  him  to  remain  firm  {Vita  Hadr/'ani,  §  15). 


522  THE  CREED  OF  CHRISTENDOM. 

a  t»  oca     new  h°Pes>  Lothair  in  869  determined  to  make  a 

A.JJ.  oo9. 

journey  to  Italy  to  solicit  the  warmer  support  of 
his  brot':  er,  and  try  what  their  united  influence  might  effect 
with  the  new  Pope.  Lewis  was  at  that  moment  pre-occupied 
with  his  siege  of  Ban',  and  would  have  had  Lothair  stay  at 
home,  but  when  his  brother  came,  did  nnt  refuse  his  help. 
Hadrian  was  invited  to  meet  the  two  brothers  — the  emperor 
and  the  king — at  Monte  Cassino.  Here  every  effort  was  made 
to  bring  about  a  reconciliation  between  Lothair  and  the  suc- 
cessor of  St.  Peter.  Hadrian  did  not  refuse  to  meet  the  King 
of  Lotharingia,  but  he  required  an  assurance,  which  was  given 
boldly  and  impudently  by  Lothair,  that  he  had  held  no  sort 
of  intercourse  with  Waldrada  since  her  excommunication. 
Lothair's  courtiers  affirmed  the  same.  The  next  day,  which 
was  Sunday,  Hadrian  himself  intoned  the  service  of  the  mass, 
and  with  his  own  hands  administered  the  elements  to  the  two 
sovereigns  and  cheir  court.  But  when  Lothair  approached  the 
altar  he  admonished  him  once  more,  using  the  awful  words  of 
this  service,  that  if  his  conscience  was  free  (as  he  had  declared) 
from  the  sin  of  intercourse  with  Waldrada,  then  he  might 
draw  near  and  receive  the  sacrament  to  his  comfort  and  to  the 
remission  of  his  sins ;  but  if  his  conscience  was  not  pure,  let 
him  not  dare  to  approach  that  holy  table,  lest  he  should  eat 
and  drink  his  own  damnation.  The  courtiers,  too,  were 
required  to  swrear  that  they  had  not  aided  nor  abetted  the  king 
in  sin,  nor  held  any  communication  with  the  excommunicated 
Waldrada.  All  received  the  sacrament  without  hesitation ; 
and  after  some  weeks  of  further  negotiation  Lothair  turned 
homeward  full  of  hopes  for  the  attainment  of  his  wishes,  seeing 
that  Hadrian  had  already  relieved  Waldrada  of  the  sentence  of 
excommunication  which  Nicholas  passed  on  her. 

On  his  return  journey  the  king  had  got  as  far  as  Lucca. 
But  there  he  was  suddenly  struck  down  by  the  fever  ;    his 


JUDGMENT  ON  LO  THAIR.  523 

courtiers,  too,  were  caught  by  the  same  malady,  those  who  had 
taken  the  false  oath  at  Monte  Cassino,  and  were  dying  by  his 
side.  One  may  guess  with  what  a  thrill  of  horror  all  men, 
all  Europe,  witnessed  this  spectacle  of  heavenly  vengeance. 
Lothair  continued  his  journey,  ill  as  he  was,  and  he  arrived 
at  Piacenza  on  the  6th  of  August,  which  was  a  Sunday — the 
last  he  would  ever  see.  Here  might  he  listen  to  the  bells 
summoning  men  and  women  to  prayers,  but  summoning  him 
— oh  !  whither?  The  beliefs  of  those  days,  Lothair's  own 
beliefs  probably,  would  leave  no  doubt  of  the  answer.  On 
that  day  the  king  took  a  sudden  turn  for  the  worse,  could  not 
be  carried  further,  lost  the  power  of  speech.  In  this  condition 
he  lingered  on  for  a  day,  and  died  on  the  8th  of  August,  689.1 


V. 

But,  after  all,  the  controversies  which  we  have  sketched  above 
are  interesting  to  us — for  what?  For  the  degree  chiefly  in 
which  they  affected,  or  illustrated,  the  current  popular  beliefs, 
the  unofficial  Christianity  of  this  century.  Those  disputes 
over  the  power  of  Peter's  chair,  those  awful  sentences  of 
excommunication — what  did  they  really  mean  ?  Surely  not  an 
antiquarian  question  only,  as  to  how  far  the  Popes  might 
reckon  themselves  the  direct  representatives  of  St.  Peter.  Such 
a  question  might  be  interesting  in  settling  a  title  to  succession, 
and  the  distribution  of  rival  powers ;  but  it  could  not  concern 
the  mass  of  the  Christian  population  of  Europe,  in  their 
homes  and  their  camps,  and  at  their  markets.  For  the 
generality  of  readers,  for  the  generality  of  historians  unhappily, 
controversies  like  these  have  degenerated  into  arid  antiquarian 
disputes,  such  as  in  our  days  would  not  be  worth  tracing.     To 

1  Regino,  s.a.  869,  gives  a  tolerably  full  account  of  these  events  (Pertz. 
i.  580-1). 


524  THE  CREED  OF  CHRISTENDOM. 

vivify  them  once  more  we  need  to  make  a  s'ipreme  effort  of 
imagination,  to  put  ourselves  back,  I  will  not  say  into,  but 
upon  the  edge  of,  in  the  penumbra  of,  the  religious  atmosphc  re 
of  those  days.  We  have  to  try  and  understand  that  system  of 
(what  shall  I  call  it  ?)  superlative  magic  on  which  rested  one 
great  portion  of  the  religious  feeling  of  that  age,  the  funda- 
mental creed  of  Catholicism.  I  mean  the  Catholic  sacra- 
mental doctrine  with  all  its  appurtenances.  We  try  to  realize 
it ;  many  people  profess  to  believe  it  stiil  as  firmly  as  ever. 
But  the  truth  is,  neither  we  nor  they  can  ever,  after  the 
revolution  of  so  many  centuries,  grasp  more  than  its  shell, 
stand  nearer  than  within  the  outer  shadow  of  that  belief. 

1  The  unworthiness  of  the  priest  hindereth  not  the  efficacy 
of  the  sacrament ' J — a  phrase  often  enough  repeated  in  these 
days,  and  approved  as  containing  a  fine  philosophical  truth  at 
the  bottom  of  it.  But  what  was  its  meaning  to  ears  in  those 
days  ?  The  '  efficacy  of  the  sacrament ' — what  was  that  ?  It 
was  the  last,  the  supreme  magic  rite  of  Christendom.  By  it 
who  knows  what  powers  of  darkness  might  be  driven  away  or 
disarmed  ?  Who  knows  what  souls  might  be  saved  by  a  mere 
incantation  beside  a  baptismal  font  or  by  a  portion  of  bread 
or  of  wine,  by  an  unction  poured  over  a  dying  man  ? 
That  power  which  a  Giinther  or  a  Thietgaud  might  hold,  was 
not  hindered  by  his  unworthiness.  While  he  held  his  ofiice 
he  held  the  conduit  as  it  were  of  a  mysterious  and  super- 
natural effluence,  immeasurable,  unmeasured.  By  regular 
course  the  stream  of  influence  descended  in  narrowing 
conduits  through  all  the  hierarchy,  good  and  bad,  from  the 
metropolitan  to  the  lowest  priest.     The  unworthiness  of  the 

1  This  doctrine  is  especially  insisted  on  in  the  work  of  Paschasius  Rad- 
bertus,  De  Corpore  et  Sanguine  Domini  (a.D.  844),  one  of  the  most 
important  theological  works  of  the  century  (see  next  note).  Cf.  especially 
chh.  xii.,  xv.  (Migne,  t.  120,  col.  13 10,  &c). 


THE  SACRAMENTAL  DOCTRINE.  525 

priest,  I  say,  could  not  hinder  this;  but  on  the  other  hand 
(and  the  corollary  must  ever  be  borne  in  mind)  the  worthi- 
ness of  the  priest  could  not  forward  it.  He  had  no  power  to 
create  a  fresh  supply  or  to  divert  the  stream  into  fresh 
channels.  Such  a  creed  is  no  doubt  still  half  believed  in  by 
thousands,  and  has  become  in  a  shadowy  way  a  common- 
place of  religion.  But  who  shall  revivify  it  so  as  to  show  us 
the  form  it  took  in  the  ninth  century?  'It  is  simply  the 
doctrine  of  the  Catholic  Church.'  But  I  am  not  concerned 
with  a  'doctrine.'     I  want  to  get  to  a  vital  belief.1 

A  tremendous  '  doctrine ;  '  still  more  tremendous  as  a  vital 
creed.  Superlative  magic — I  do  not  think  one  can  find 
any  otht-r  name  which  expresses  it  so  well.  Like  all  magic, 
properly  so  called,  this  obeys  material  laws.  Spiritual  insight 
will  give  no  clue  as  to  its  action.  An  unseen,  immaterial- 
material  stream  flowing  through  certain  agencies,  transmitted 
by  mechanical  means.  Without  it  (so  men  deem)  none  of 
the  spiritual  life  of  Christianity  can  be  kept  alive;  without  it 
the  heavens  themselves  become  darkened  to  you.  Yet  you 
yourself  have  no  control  over  this  stream,  nor  has  he  who 
passes  it  on  to  you ;  the  unworthiness  of  the  vessel  does  not 
hinder,  the  worthiness  does  not  forward. 

Most  people  make  no  inquiry  into  the  ultimate  sources  of 
their  beliefs.     '  The  world  rests  upon  an  elephant,  the  elephant 

1  I  take  it  that  of  the  two  great  sacraments  of  the  Church,  baptism  was 
reckoned  by  far  the  most  important  in  the  palmy  days  of  conversion  to 
Christ,  and  that  the  Kucha  istic  sacrament  now  began  to  equal  or  outweigh  it 
in  importance.  Gfrorer  says,  'Till  the  middle  of  the  ninth  century  there 
reigned  in  the  Church  no  fixed  opinion  touching  the  sacrament  of  the  altar. 
So.ne  spoke  of  a  change  in  the  elements  ;  some  understood  this  in  a 
spiritual  sense.'  It  was  the  treatise  of  Radbert,  above  spoken  of,  and 
another,  of  an  opposite  tendency,  attributed  to  John  Scotus,  which  at  just 
this  period  helped  to  bring  into  prominence  the  question  of  Transubstan- 
tiation.  The  views  of  Radbert  triumphed  ;  Scotus  was  almost  universally 
condemned.  Cf.  Gfrorer,  o.c.  ch.  ii.,  and  Untersucliungiiber  Alter,  Urspr., 
c.~Y.,  des  falschen  Isidore  p.  129  sqti. 


526  THE  CREED  OF  CHRISTENDOM. 

upon  a  tortoise — on  what  does  the  tortoise  rest  ? '  4  We  have 
no  valid  evidence  of  the  reality  of  our  sensations ;  we  have 
no  valid  evidence  of  the  reality  of  our  ideas.  What,  then, 
are  the  ultimate  truths  ? '  These  are  the  kind  of  questions 
which  few  people  ask.  But  everybody  is  dependent  more  or 
less  upon  those  who  have  asked  them,  and  upon  the  answers 
they  have  found.  I  guess  in  the  same  way  that  few  among 
the  two  or  three  millions  of  Christians  in  Western  Europe  in 
those  days  asked,  '  What  is  the  ultimate  source,  the  reservoir  of 
this  magic  stream  which  flows  through  Christianity  ?  '  'Who  ' 
— to  put  the  question  concretely — '  who  can  deprive  this  Giinther 
of  his  power  over  the  conduit  which  he  holds?'  And  yet 
every  one  of  those  millions  was  dependent  upon  the  answer 
given  to  the  question.  Now,  therefore,  we  see  how  these 
controversies  over  the  power  of  synods,  over  the  rights  of 
Peter's  chair,  were  vital  even  to  the  popular  religion  of  those 
days.  For  it  was  the  control  of  this  magic  life-blood  of  the 
Church  that  was  called  in  question. 

One  cannot  say  that  the  difficulty  was  ever  fully  solved, 
any  more  than  those  metaphysical  questions  which  have  vexed 
mankind  since  mankind  first  began  to  speculate.  Still,  it  is 
necessary  that  some  sort  of  answer  to  them  should  be  forth- 
coming. Undoubtedly  in  the  case  of  such  a  belief  as  we  have 
been  describing  it  was  of  advantage  that  the  source  of  the  ma_ic 
power  should  be  as  remote  as  possible.  Omne  ignotum  pro 
magnifico,  as  we  have  said.  A  man  knew  his  metropolitan  too 
well;  but  if  behind  and  over  the  metropolitan  stood  the  dun 
and  awful  figure  of  the  Pope,  that  woald  tend  to  reassure  men 
as  to  the  clearness  of  the  ultimate  source.  And  it  was  probably 
better  for  the  piety  of  pious  Germans  and  Frenchmen  if  they 
did  not  (like  Luther)  ever  make  the  journey  to  Rome. 

I  have  designedly  sought  to  speak  of  this  mystic  sacramental 
infiuen  e  as  a  stream  flowing  out  from  Rome  over  all  Christen- 


THE  SACRAMENTAL  DOCTRINE.  527 

dom.  For  at  the  beginning,  if  the  reader  remembers,  we 
spoke  in  like  fashion  of  the  stream  of  civilizing  influence 
which  flowed  out  from  pagan  Rome  to  the  various  quarters  of 
her  empire.  And  the  later  influence  is  in  some  degree  the 
antithesis  of  the  earlier. 

We  are  discussing,  not  the  doctrines  of  mediaeval  Christianity 
in  the  abstract,  but  those  doctrines  which  came  face  to  face 
with  northern  heathendom.  While  it  conquered  in  arms, 
they  conquered  it  in  spirit.  All  the  more  awful  seemed  this 
mystic  power,  the  more  distant  its  source,  the  greater  the 
ramification  of  members,  as  through  some  highly  constituted 
organism,  through  which  it  flowed. 

Can  we  doubt  that  the  Northmen  had  inherited  from  their 
fathers  wonderful  legends  of  the  power,  the  magical  power,  of 
pagan  Rome ;  of  that  immense  ramification  of  it  through  all  th  * 
civilized  world,  the  visible  symbol  of  which  for  us,  we  settled 
long  ago,  should  be  the  Roman  roads  ?  But  to  know  in  what 
form  the  belief  in  the  magic  powers  of  the  Church  would  reach 
the  minds  of  the  Vikings,  we  must  translate  that  belief  into 
its  popular  forms.  We  must  imagine  it  enforced  by  a  thou- 
sand appeals  to  the  senses,  through  all  those  aesthetic  channels 
whose  creation  has  been  among  the  greatest  gifts  of  mediaeval 
Catholicism  to  the  world. 

VI. 

To  this  same  century,  or  to  the  beginning  of  the  tenth, 
belong  two  magic  formulae,  which  are  certainly  an  echo  of  Old 
German  heathenism — the  last  echo  which  German  heathenism, 
as  distinguished  from  the  Norse,  was  to  leave  in  the  world. 
These  two  fragments  are  known  as  the  Merseburg  incantations. 
They  have  come  down  to  us  in  a  tenth-century  manuscript, 
probably  from  the  hand  of  a  monk  of  Fulda. 

Fulda   stood   so   deep  in   the   recesses    of   Old   Germany, 


528  THE  CREED  OF  CHRISTENDOM. 

among  those  Taunus  mountains  which  we  once  spoke  of  as 
the  bulwark  of  ancient  heathendom,  so  near  the  other  historic 
forests — the  Teutoberger  Wald,  the  Hercynian  Forest — that 
here  was  the  place  for  the  peasant  monks  to  find  among  their 
brother  peasants  still  lingering  traces  of  the  old  beliefs.  It  is 
recorded  that  in  Charlemagne's  time  many  old  heathen  songs 
were  collected  by  the  monks  and  sung  in  the  monasteries  oj 
Germany.  We  sigh  over  the  little  they  collected,  the  less  still 
that  has  been  handed  down  to  us.  Yet  what  business  had 
they  with  these  relics  of  'devil-worship'?  The  practice  had 
to  be  forbidden  in  the  capitularies  of  Charlemagne.  These 
are  the  two  formulae ;  strange  are  they — nay,  inexplicable — 
in  our  eyes  : — 

First  Merseburg  Formula.1 

For  loosening  the  bonds  of  a  prisoner. 

Eiris  sazun  idisi  sazun  hera  duoder. 

Suma  hapt  hepidun,  suma  heri  lezidun, 

Suma  clubodun  umbi  cuniouuidi  : 

Insprinc  haptbandun,  invar  vigandun  ! 

Einst  sassan  Jung  frauen  ;  setzen  sich  hierhin  und  dorthin. 

Einige  hefteten  Bande  einige  hemmten  das  Heer, 

Einige  pfliikteten,  noch  Kniefesseln  he  nun  : 

Entspring  den  Heftbanden,  entfahre  den  Feinden  1 

Second  Formula. 

For  curing  a  lame  horse. 

Phol  ende  Uuodan  vuorun  zi  holza. 

Du  uuart  demo  Baldares  volon  sin  vuoz  birenkit. 

Thu  biguolen  Sinthgunt,  Surma  era  suister, 

Thu  beguolen  Volla,  P'rija  era  suister  : 

Thu  beguolen  Uuodan,  so  he  uuola  couda. 

Sosa  benrenkf,  sose  bluotrenkt, 

Sose  lidirenki. 

Ben  zi  bena,  bluot  zi  bluoda, 

Lid  zi  geliden,  sose  gelimida  sin. 


1  From  Mullenhoft  and  Scherer,  /><///.  Poesie  ti.  Prosa,ip.Q. 


RELICS  OF  HEATHENISM.  529 

Phol  und  Wodan  fuhren  zu  Holze  ; 

Da  ward  Baldares  Fohlen  sein  Fuss  verrenkt. 

Da  besprach  ihn  Singunda,  Sonne  ihre  Schwester, 

Da  besprach  ihn  Folia  Frija  ihre  Schwe-ter: 

Da  besprach  ihn  Wocian  der  es  wold  versteht.1 

So  die  Beinrenkung,  so  die  Blutrenkung, 

So  die  Gliedrenkung. 

Bein  zu  Bein,  Blut  zu  Blut, 

Glied  zu  Gliede,  so  als  ob  se  geleimt  waren. 

Such  fragments  as  these  are  almost  worthless  in  themselves  ; 
but  as  memorials  or  symbols  of  the  contact  between  Christen- 
dom and  heathendom,  they  deserve  a  place  here.  For  it  so 
happens  that  to  this  century  also  belong  the  earliest  vernacular 
Christian  poems  of  Germany.  One,  a  tolerably  long  one,  is 
known  to  modern  students  as  Heliand  (Heiland),  the  Saviour; 
this  is  a  Low  German  (Saxon)  poem.  The  other  is  in  High 
German  (Bavarian),  and  was  in  fact  dedicated  to  Lewis  the 
German.  It  is  a  mere  fragment ;  we  might  call  it  a  semi- 
Christian  poem,  for  it  is  partly  mythological.  It  is  known  by 
the  name  of  Muspilli.  The  fragment  which  has  come  down 
to  us  gives  an  account  of  the  end  of  the  world.  Do  not,  there- 
fore, Christendom  and  heathendom  seem  to  meet  in  Germany 
at  this  moment  as  at  no  other  ? 

Though,  we  have  said,  Charles  the  Great  directed  capitularies 
against  the  practice  ol  preserving  ancient  poems  and  fragments 
of  heathenism  (rather  inconsistently  with  his  own  habit  of  col- 
lecting all  the  heroic  la)s  of  heathen  Germany),  I  surmise  that 
the  ancient  popular  beliefs  were  not  looked  at  so  much  askance 
then  as  they  came  to  be  a  century  or  two  later,  when  they  had 
merged  in  '  witchcraft.'  Even  in  the  bloody  '  Saxon  capitu- 
laries' of  Charles,  wherein  the  death  penalty  is  enacted  against 
all  who  so  much  as  hide  themselves  to  escape  baptism,  we 
notice  that  the  practice  of  some  old  heathen  sacrifices  are  only 

1  Cf.  Chap.  II.  sec.  v. 

35 


530  THE  CREED  OF  CHRISTENDOM, 

punished  by  fine,  not  by  death — a  certain  testimony  to  the 
tenacity  of  popular  belief.1 

It  was  not  till  a  century  or  two  later — the  eleventh  or  twelfth 
— that  the  ancient  beliefs  of  Germany  had  been  transformed 
into  those  dark  and  awful  superstitions  which,  in  the  eyes  of 
Christians,  took  the  form  of  the  blackest  magic  and  necro- 
mancy. That  was,  in  truth,  a  necromancy,  and  of  a  peculiarly  im- 
pressive kind — the  summoning  from  its  tomb  of  a  buried  creed. 
At  present  popular  superstition  and  Christian  belief  lived 
on  better  terms.  Christians  and  heathens  a;ike  lived  on  the 
borderland  of  mythology.  No  sooner  was  a  great  man  dead, 
than  myth  took  possession  of  him  and  transformed  him. 
Charlemagne,  for  example  :  no  sooner  was  he  gathered  to  his 
fathers  than  there  began  to  spring  up  the  Carling  myth,  which 
went  on  growing  for  centuries.  Charlemagne's  mother,  Queen 
Bertha  :  we  know  the  story  which  grew  up  about  her — of  the 
persecutions  she  endured  from  her  suspicious  husband,  com- 
parable to  the  sufferings  of  the  patient  Griselda.  Queen 
Bertha's  age  passed  into  the  ideal  of  a  golden  age—  il  buon 
tempo  quando  Berta  filava,  '  the  good  old  days  when  Bertha 
span.'  And  yet  it  was  not  really  she  who  was  the  heroine  of  that 
picture,  but  another  Bertha,  Berchta,  Perchta,  the  old  heathen 
German  goddess,  of  whom  we  spoke  long  ago— the  spinner, 
the  goddess  of  the  household,  the  goddess  of  the  hearth,  and 
not  less  a  goddess  of  the  earth*  and  of  all  nature;  such  as  was 
old  Goddess  Nerthus,  who  was  perhaps  identical  with  her. 
When  snow  fell,  it  was  (or  is)  in  German   popular   belief  the 


1  Capitulare  Faderbmnnense,  No.  21.  Si  quis  ad  fontes  aut  arbores  vel 
lucos  votum  fecerit,  aut  aliquit  \sic\  more  gentilium  obtulerit,  et  ad  honorem 
daemonum  commederet  [sic] ;  si  nobilis  fuerit  solidos  sexaginta  ;  si  ingenuus 
[friling]  triginta  ;  si  litus  quindecim.     Leges  i.  49. 

2  Hearth,  Earth,  Herde,  Erde— the  one  in  a  certain  sense  the  image  of 
the  other, 


MYTHOLOGY.  531 

feathers  which  Queen  Bcrchta  shakes  down  as  she  makes  her 
bed.1 

I  believe  in  like  manner  that  many  things  related  of  the 
mythic  Charlemagne,  many  features  in  the  likeness  which  men 
drew  of  him  in  after-years,  were  inherited  from  the  old  King 
of  Gods,  the  All-father,  father  of  gods  and  men — the  very 
Woden  of  the  incantation  just  cited,  of  whom  we  spoke  at 
length  in  an  earlier  chapter.  He  should  be  by  rights  the  hus- 
band of  the  great  Goddess  Berchta.  In  this  manner  mythology 
— the  lost  mythology  of  the  Old  Germans — always,  as  I  think, 
stood  behind  the  recognized  creed  of  even  the  Christian 
Teutons,  ready  to  obtrude  itself  or  to  filch  away  unseen  a 
belief  or  a  fancy  here  and  there  from  history  or  from  the 
Christian  faith.  It  is,  we  know,  a  lost  mythology  ;  we  can 
only  guess  at  some  of  its  features  by  the  aid  of  that  kindred 
mythology  which  still  informed  the  beliefs  of  the  Scan- 
dinavians. 

I  suppose  that  the  development  of  both  forms  of  popular 
mythology — the  mythology  which  grew  out  of  the  sacramental 
doctrine,  which  clustered  round  the  holy  elements,  holy  water, 
holy  oil,  relics,  shrines,  talismans  of  many  k'nds;  and  that 
other  heathen  mythology  which  time  converted  into  dsemono- 
logy  and  witchcraft,  legends  of  the  Wild  Huntsman,  and  all 
the  legion  of  fiends  and  goblins  who  haunted  the  imagination 
of  men  in  the  Middle  Ages — was  due  in  a  large  measure  to 
this  mingling  of  Christianity  and  heathenism.  The  elements 
of  all  these  beliefs  are  primeval.  There  never  was  a  time 
and  there  never  was  a  people  which  has  not  believed  in 
talismans  and  viatica,  nor  in  fiends  and  witches.  It  was  the 
vividness  of  this  belief  which  made  the  characteristic  of 
mediaeval  Christianity.     The  ancient  creed   of  Germany  laid 

1  See  Wuttke,  Deutsch.  Vqlksabergl.^  s.v,  Perchta  $  (irim.  D.  A/.,  s.v, 
Berhta. 


532  THE  CREED  OF  CHRISTENDOM. 

the  foundation  of  that  overpowering  sense  of  the  narrowness  of 
the  known  world  and  the  vast  regions  of  the  unknown  which 
became  the  prevailing  note  of  mediaeval  Christianity,  and 
which  people  mean,  but  very  inadequately  express,  when  they 
talk  of  the  '  superstition  of  the  Middle  Ages.'  It  is  the  anti- 
thesis of  the  spirit  of  the  Renaissance,  at  the  dawn  of  which 
the  world  seemed  to  grow  light  again,  and  the  giants  of  the  fog 
and  mist  retreated  once  more  to  the  outward  regions  of  earth. 
In  the  gloomy  aisles  of  the  Gothic  cathedral ;  in  the  wind-like 
voice  of  the  organ ;  in  the  unmeasured  belief  in  and  dread  of 
witchcraft,  we  have  echoes  nearer,  or  more  remote,  of  the  creed 
of  the  ancient  German.  We  have  it,  too,  in  the  picture  of  the 
mediaeval  devil,  grotesque  yet  terrible,  and  of  the  witches' 
Sabbath  on  the  Brocken. 

For  the  present  these  forces  were  working  beneath  the 
surface.  We  have  to  pass  on  a  century  or  two  btfore  we 
realize  their  full  effect,  an  effect  brought  to  light  when 
mediaeval  Catholicism  has  at  once  absorbed  the  most  of  and 
grown  mo  t  repugnant  to  the  heathenism  of  ancient  days.  It 
is  among  the  paradoxes  in  the  history  of  thought,  that  contra- 
dictions like  these  are  so  common.  The  ascetic  monk,  or  his 
intellectual  offspring,  becomes  the  most  rigid  Protestant ;  he 
burns  what  he  has  adored  and  adores  what  he  has  burned ;  he, 
above  all  men,  ridicules  the  superstition  of  the  Catholics ;  but 
he  imports  his  own  dark  and  superstitious  character  into  his 
new  creed,  and  out  of  his  '  Predestination  and  Election  to 
Life,'  uprises  a  fetichism  as  degrading  as  any  which  he  had 
abandoned. 

So  it  was  with  the  descendants  of  those  Vikings  who  were  at 
this  moment  bringing  havoc  among  the  monasteries  of  France, 
of  whom  peace  was  soon  to  be  purchased  at  the  cost  of  a 
great  cession  of  territory  in  Neustria.  These  descendants, 
the  Normans,   became  the  patrons   of   mediaeval  Catholicism 


MEDIAEVAL  CATHOLICISM.  533 

and  of  all  that  political  and  social  fabric,  on  which  it 
rested  for  support.  Not  themselves  great  in  art,  not  ori- 
ginal in  their  beliefs,  they  were  great  in  government,  in 
employing  the  intellect  of  others  to  frame  the  elements  of 
a  life  to  which  they  imparted  their  own  rigid  and  gloomy 
character — 

Tu  regere  iinperio  populos,  Romane,  memento. 

They  used  the  best  genius  of  France  and  created  the 
Norman  architecture.  They  used  their  own  matchless  genius 
for  command  to  change  France  and  England ;  they  were  the 
feudalists  ot  feudalism,  the  pioneers  of  the  Crusades,  and  the 
Puritans  of  mediaeval  Christianity.  Other  influences  assisted. 
Christianity  grew  near  to  its  millennium ;  that  time  it  was 
confidently  said  had  been  fixed  for  the  limit  of  the  reign  of 
the  Church  militant,  the  beginning  of  the  reign  of  the  Church 
Triumphant,  the  second  coming  of  Christ  to  judge  the  world. 
And  when  that  hope  and  terror  passed  away,  there  followed 
the  establishment  o.  the  feudal  system  in  all  its  rigidity. 

It  is  after  this  date  that  we  begin  to  hear  stories  of  a  sort  of 
revival  of  heathenism  in  remote  and  country  districts,  such  as 
that  story  of  the  revival  of  Nerthus-worship,  by  the  rustics 
near  Comelimunster,  which  is  described  so  graphically  by  the 
Abbot  of  St.  Tron.  We  may  call  such  instances  the  last 
struggle  of  Heathendom,  not  able  any  longer  to  hide  itself  from 
the  scrutiny  of  orthodoxy ;  as  it  still  might  do,  we  saw,  in  the 
days  of  Charlemagne,  when,  though  it  was  death  to  remain 
unbaptized,  it  was  only  a  matter  of  a  fine  to  be  caught  offering 
some  ancient  rustic  sacrifice.  Now,  too,  we  begin  to  hear  most 
of  Satan  and  the  Witches'  Sabbath,  and  all  those  dark  stories 
of  compacts  with  the  fiend;  of  the  Wild  Hunt  (Arthur's  Chase); 
the  Phantom  Army,  and  the  thousand  similar  legends  which 
constituted  the  very  marrow  of  mediaeval  supeis  ition. 


534  THE  CREED  OF  CHRISTENDOM. 

It  was  of  the  essence  of  feudalism  to  foster  beliefs  like  these, 
much  more  so,  in  truth,  than  it  was  of  the  essence  of  the  life  of 
the  Vikings  to  do  so.  This  last  was  the  very  ideal  of  a  wandering 
life ;  the  other  the  most  fixed  imaginable.  The  serf  was  bound  to 
the  soil;  the  lord  was  not  less  securely  rooted  upon  his  own  land. 
'No  land  without  a  lord,  no  lord  without  land,'  was  the  watch- 
word of  this  system.  Strange  that  the  descendants  of  the 
Vikings  should  have  been  its  chief  promoters.  But  opposed 
as  it  seemed  to  their  spirit,  it  was  in  harmony  with  the  ancient 
social  life,  and,  as  we  have  said,  the  ancient  beliefs  of  the 
German  people  as  a  whole.  It  has  been  said,  rather  para- 
doxically, that  the  feudal  system  was  nothing  more  than  a  de- 
velopment from  the  village  life  of  the  ancient  Germans  in  days 
before  they  began  to  think  of  migration,  and  lived  contented 
in  their  villages  and  Gaus.  At  least  feudalism  had  a  closer 
relation  to  this  social  life  than  to  the  city  life  of  the  Latin 
peoples. 

But  neither  the  Vikings  as  a  whole  nor  the  Scandinavian 
nations  were  ever  fully  drawn  into  this  system  which  brooded 
over  Central  Europe.  Therefore  the  creed  of  the  Vikings  as  a 
whole — that  creed  I  mean  which  is  preserved  in  the  Edda — 
cannot  be  reckoned  a  constituent  element  of  the  beliefs  of  the 
Middle  Ages,  in  the  same  sense  that  the  creed  of  the  ancit  nt 
Germans  became  so.  It  is  for  this  reason  that  I  have  sought 
to  make  a  distinction  between  the  two,  to  extract  from  the 
Scandinavian  mythology  those  parts  which  appealed  antique, 
leaving  the  whole  corpus  of  Eddaic  muhology  to  be  spoken  of 
in  its  proper  place  in  the  history  of  the  Vikings— if  we  should 
even  reach  that  point. 

For  before  we  reached  that  point  we  should  have  to  go  back 
somewhat  in  time  and  watch  the  dawnings  of  history  in  the 
Scandinavian  countries  themselves,  and  note  other  signs  of 
national  activity,  such  as  colonization;  the  re-discovery,  and  the 


POPULAR  CHRISTIANITY.  535 

colonization  of  Iceland*  for  example  ;    matters  which    do    not 
belong  to  an  account  of  the  Viking  raids  in  Christendom. 


VII. 

We  have  dwelt  rather  on  the  superstition  of  these  times  than 
on  the  whole  body  of  Christian  belief.  The  simpler  features 
in  the  latter  may  be  taken  more  or  less  for  granted  ;  it  is  to  the 
former  that  we  owe  most  of  what  is  distinctive  in  mediaeval 
Catholicism.  I  would  not,  however,  be  thought  to  imply  that 
the  people  learnt  no  more  from  Christianity  than  the  belief  in 
its  magic  powers  through  sacraments,  relics,  the  mystic  rites  of 
the  Church ;  or  than  the  dread  of  the  antithesis  of  Catholic 
magic,  the  survival  of  heathenism  in  witchcraft.  The  former, 
the  orthodox  magic,  if  I  may  be  allowed  to  use  the  word,  was, 
indeed,  according  to  the  belief  of  those  days,  the  primary 
condition  of  all  spiritual  influence.  The  being  uncreated  by 
baptism,  unrenewed  by  the  sacraments,  was  spiritually  non- 
existent. But  the  creed,  the  moral  code,  which  grew  up  in 
this  atmosphere  was  simple,  pious,  sincere.  We  have  from  the 
age  with  which  we  are  dealing  the  best  proof  of  this  in  those 
two  vernacular  poems — poems  preserved  in  the  popular  speech 
the  deutsch — whereof  mention  has  been  already  made ;  more 
especially  in  the  longer  one  of  the  two,  Heliand.  The  language 
of  popes  and  councils  may  be  a  mere  specious  hypocrisy,  or 
a  meaningless  reverberation  from  the  language  of  the  apostles 
and  the  fathers  of  the  Church.  But  this  could  never  be  the 
case  in  a  popular  poem  founded  upon  the  Christian  creed. 

Heliand  is  a  poem  in  old  Saxon,  almost  the  counterpart  of  the 
poems  written  in  this  country  in  Anglo-Saxon,  and  commonly 
called  the  poems  of  Caedmon  ;  but  that  this  is  a  metrical  para- 
phrase of  the  Evangelists.  Here  in  Saxony,  therefore,  the  last 
conquered  of  the  Christian  territories,  baids  had  been  found,  as 


536  THE  CREED  OF  CHRISTENDOM. 

in  England,  to  turn  their  art  away  from  ,its  old  uses,  and  instead 
Df  chanting  the  glories  of  national  heroes — 

Wel-hwylc  gecwseS 
I»3et  he  fram  Sigemundes  secgan  hyrde 
Ellendsedum,  uncupes  fela, 
Waelsinges  gewin.  .  . 

(Everything  he  told 
That  he  of  Sigmund  had  heard  sing, 
Of  glorious  deeds,  uncouth  things,1 
The  Volsungs'  victories.) 

to  celebrate  the  glories  of  the  Saviour  and  their  new  creed. 

There  is  a  story  how  one  of  the  English  bishops  received  a 
Divine  command  to  devote  in  this  manner  his  art  to  the 
furtherance  of  Christianity :  how  he  sat  by  the  high  roads 
chanting  the  story  of  the  gospel  till  men  turned  and  listened. 
The  like  story  how  Csedmon's  lips  were  opened  and  he  received 
the  same  Divine  gift  of  song  is  well  known.  No  more  potent 
form  of  preaching  could  be  found  than  this.  Of  formal 
preaching  the  Deutsch  folk  got  little,  pruba'dy.  There  are, 
indeed,  at  some  of  the  councils  held  in  this  century  — notably 
at  a  great  council  held  at  Mainz  under  the  presidency  of 
Raban — provisions  made  for  the  reading  of  sermons  and 
homilies  to  the  people  in  their  native  tongue.  Of  course  most 
of  the  lower  order  of  priests  understood  and  spoke  each  the 
dialect  of  deutsch  which  belonged  to  the  district  from  which  he 
came.  But  such  priests  were  not  the  men  to  do  much  in  the 
way  of  original  sermon  writing;  and  all  the  homilits  at  present 
in  use  were  in  Latin.  It  was  considered  a  thing  worthy  of 
note  that  such  men  as  Wala  and  Raban  could  speak  this 
popular  tongue.  The  real  preachers  of  Christianity  among  the 
people  were,  first  the  bells  and  chants  and  mystic  rites  which 

1  Unknown  tilings. 


HE  LI  AND. 


537 


embodied  the  spirit  of  the  creed ;  and  next  the  bards,  such  as 
the  author  of  the  HelianJ,  who  set  its  creed  to  popular  verse. 
Nor  can  we  without  wonder  think  of  the  forest  shades  which 
a  generation  or  two  ago  had  echoed  the  wild  shouts  of  Widu- 
kind's  soldiers,  the  cries  of  Nerthus'  priests,  perhaps  the 
screams  of  human  victims  sacrificed  to  Odin,  listening  to  such 
words  as  these  from  the  Heliand  poet — x 


Then  setteth  he  the  lost 
Upon  his  left-hand  side. 
He  setteth  on  the  right 
And  speaketh  to  them, 

'  And  take  the  rich  kingdom 

For  them  his  good  children, 

This  hath  set  apart, 

Ye  must  your  happiness  enjoy 

For  oft  have  ye  done  my  will 

And  were  good  to  me  with  your  gifts, 

With  thirst  or  hunger, 

When  I  lay  in  fetters, 

Oft  came  there  to  me, 

Then  the  righteous  answer 

'  My  Father  the  Good,  answer  me 

Or  thus  oppressed, 

Almighty  !  and  declarest 

When  saw  thee  a  single  man 

For  thou  hast  the  might  of  all  men.' 

Then  in  reply  the  Only  Good, 

To  those  of  your  faith 


the  accursed  of  mankind 

But  the  blessed 

and  greeteth  the  good, 

'Come  ye,'  he  says,  '  who  here  are 

chosen 
the  fair  one  prepared  for  you, 
kept  to  the  world's  end, 
the  Father  of  all  my  children 
and  govern  this  wide  kingdom 
and  well  entreated  me, 
when  I  was  oppressed, 
or  seized  with  cold 
cramped  in  prison, 
help  of  your  hands.' 

when  were  you  thus  in  prison, 
as  before  folk  thou  tellest 

in  such  plight  ? 

'  All  that  ye  did,'  he  says, 
ye  did  it  to  God's  honour.' 


And  so  on  to  the  end  of  the  twenty-fifth  chapter  of  Matthew. 

There  is  no  need  to  enlarge  upon  this  poem,  because,  as  we 
can  see  by  the  above  passage,  it  is  neither  more  nor  less  than 
a  metrical  paraphrase  of  the  Evangelists.  But  the  childlike 
simplicity  of  the  language  seems  to  give  it  new  force,  and  cer- 
tainly it  enables  us  better  to  realize  the  kind  of  Christianity 
preached  among  the  Saxon  farms  and  villages.     In  one  or  two 


M.  Heyne,  Bibl.  der  alt.  dcut.  Lit      Heliand  (1883). 


538 


THE  CREED  OF  CHRISTENDOM. 


points,  moreover,  the  author  has  departed  from  his  original. 
Christ  is  not  a  peasant's  son,  but  a  young  prince  (Droste) — a 
prince  in  Saxony,  as  it  almost  seems ;  though  Jerusalem  and 
the  other  Bible  names  are  imported  from  the  Gospels. 

To  what  degree  this  story  of  the  life  of  Christ  may  have 
taken  its  place  in  popular  belief,  one  cannot  say.  At  any 
rate,  it  scarcely  belongs  to  that  picture  of  the  actual  world  of 
the  Germans  which  we  want  to  realize.  With  another  large 
part  of  the  Christian  doctrine  it  was  different ;  and  it  was 
different  again  with  that  picture  of  the  destruction  of  the  world 
which  Heliand  faithfully  reproduces  lrom  the  original,  but  in 
its  own  simple  and  direct  language.  That,  as  a  future  event, 
and  not  a  past  one,  formed  a  potent  factor  in  the  world-theory 
of  all  men  at  this  time ;  and  we  have  already  seen  how  much 
men  in  this  age  had  begun  to  concern  themselves  with 
the  picture  of  the  future,  of  the  end  of  the  world,  and  of 
heaven  and  hell. 


Then  shall  men  see  the  Moon, 

Both  lose  their  light, 

The  Stars  fall — 

The  Earth  quakes ; 

Such  signs  shall  be. 

The  great  Sea  roars  ; 

The  waves  cast  fear 

Then  the  multitude  minish 

The  folk  through  fear  ; 

But  manifold  contest 

Is  raised  up. 

Each  race  another 

To  the  kings'  battle 

Many  deaths  in  pain 

It  is  a  fearful  thing 

Arise  among  men. 

Great  pestilence  shall  spread 

Such  death  among  mankind 

Men  lie  in  sickness, 

They  fall  and  die 

And  so  forth. 


and  the  Sun  likewise, 
and  be  swallowed  up  in  darkness, 
the  white  lights  of  heaven  ; 
the  broad  world  heaves. 

the  storms  are  let  loose ; 
on  the  dwellers  upon  earth. 
through  great  oppression  ; 
for  Peace  is  there  nowhere  ; 
o'er  all  the  world 

sttives  to  master ; 

mighty  musterings  shall  be  J 

and  open  war. 

that  such  slaughter  shall 

over  the  world  ; 
as  never  before  in  Mittelgard. 
perishing  in  the  plague  ; 
and  end  their  days — 


MUSP1LLL  539 

The  other  Christian  poem  written  about  this  time  is  in  the 
hoch  deutsch  vernacular.  It  was  written  in  Bavaria  and  dedi- 
cated to  Lewis  the  German.  This  is  the  poem  which  com- 
monly goes  by  the  name  of  Muspilli.x  It  is  more  original 
than  the  Helia?id.  It  is  a  prophetic  piece,  describing  the  end 
of  the  world ;  and  the  description  is  such  that  we  can  easily 
detect  an  admixture  of  heathen  beliefs  with  the  Christian. 

I  have  said  the  poem  is  devoted  to  a  description  of  the  end 
of  the  world  ;  I  should  rather  have  said  the  fragment  of  it 
which  has  come  down  to  us  is  so.  This  Bavarian  poem  is  not 
represented  by  a  long  MS.,  comparable  to  the  Saxon  Heliand ; 
only  by  quite  a  small  fragment.  This  fragment  is,  however,  so 
far  as  it  goes,  a  genuine  contribution  to  our  knowledge  of  the 
beliefs  of  those  days.  It  is  not  a  mere  reproduction  from  the 
Bible. 

The  poem  ends  with  a  picture  of  the  great  Artnageddon,  the 
battle  between  the  celestial  and  infernal  powers,  which  is  to  be 
immediately  followed  by  the  burning  of  the  world.  Here  the 
battle  consists  of  personal  combats  between  selected  cham- 
pions from  heaven  and  hell.  The  word  used  for  the  fire  that 
consumes  the  world  is  that  from  which  the  poem  has  received 
its  name,  Miispilli,  and  it  is  the  most  significant  word  in  the 
poem  ;  or  we  find  it  occurring  also  in  the  Eddas.2  Here, 
then,  we  have  a  still  closer  meeting-point  between  Christianity 
and  heathendom.  For  we  shall  find  in  the  Northern  Eddas, 
which  are  the  last  voice  of  heathen  mythology,  other  descrip- 
tions of  the  ending  of  the  wo  Id  and  the  personal  combats 
which  preceded  it,  in  many  points  exactly  similar  to  the 
description  in  Muspilli^  which  is  the  first  voice  (almost)   of 

1  Muspilli,  Ed.  Schmeller,  1 882. 

2  Bugge,  however,  contends  that  the  Eddaic  word  Muspell  has  been 
merely  copied  from  the  German  word  mttspil/i,  which  he  (and  Vigfusson 
follows  him)  derives  from  Munt-spilli,  *  world  destruction  '  (Lat.  mundus, 
Ger.  spilli). 


54o 


THE  CREED  OE  CHRISTENDOM. 


Christian  mythology  in  Germany.  Whether  we  come  to 
the  conclusion  that  the  Eddaic  picture  is  derived  from  the 
Christian,  or  whether  the  picture  in  Muspilli  is  an  echo  of  Old 
German  heathenism,  the  likeness  between  the  northern  poem 
and  the  Bavarian  remains.  Here,  then,  is  the  Bavarian 
account,  with  which  we  will  conclude  our  fragmentary  picture 
of  the  popular  creed  of  Christian  Europe  at  the  end  of  the 
ninth  century  : — 


There  comes  an  army 
Another  from  the  pitch  of  hell. 
Care  shall  possess  it, 
To  which  of  the  armies 
For  should  the  following 
Quick  will  they  carry  it 
To  the  smoke  and  the  darkness. 
But  if  those  obtain  it, 
The  angels'  prize  it  is  ; 
Where  is  life  without  death, 
A  home  without  care  ; 
When  one  a  habitation 
A  house  in  heaven, 
Therefore  needeth  every  one 
That  he  the  will  of  God 
And  Hell's  fire 


from  the  stars  of  heaven  ; 

Around  that  soul  they  s  rive. 

till  the  wager  be  settled, 

that  soul  shall  belong 

of  Satan  obtain  it, 

there  where  all  borrow  springs  ; 

That  is  a  direful  lot. 

who  from  Heaven  come, 

they  bear  it  to  the  heavenly  kingdom  ; 

light  without  d  rkness, 

there  is  none  sick. 

in  Paradise  winneth, 

there  hath  he  abundant  comfort. 

that  his  thoughts  thither  turn, 

willingly  worketh, 

fleeth  with  fear. 


And  more  in  this  strain.  So  far  we  have  pure  Christianity, 
and  little  of  the  mythical  element.  But  now  we  pass  on  to  the 
final  battle  of  the  world — a  battle  known  only  to  the  eye  of 
prophecy,  and  of  which  the  battle  over  each  individual  soul  is 
a  kind  of  symbol. 


This  have  I  heard 

Elias  shall  fight 

The  warlock  is  harnessed  ; 

Mighty  the  combatants ; 

Elias  strives 

Of  the  righteous  will  he 

Therefore  to  his  help 

Antichrist  upholdeth 

The  old  fiend  Satan, 


the  wise  ones  declare, 

with  Antichrist. 

a  battle  there  shall  be. 

mighty  too  the  prize. 

for  everlasting  life ; 

the  kingdom  establish. 

the  heavenly  powers  come. 

the  Old  Enemy, 

who  shall  his  destruction  be. 


MUSPILLI. 


54i 


Wherefore  on  the  battlefield 
And  there  for  ever 
Of  godly  men  many  think 
And  when  Elias's  blood 
The  hills  catch  fire  ; 
None  remains  on  earth  ; 
i  he  sea  steams  ; 
The  moon  falls  from  heaven  ; 
No  rock  stands  firm ; 

It  comes  with  fire 

No  man  his  brother 

When  the  broad  face  of  earth 

And  in  fire  and  rain 

Where  are  the  boundaries 

The  boundary  is  burnt, 

She  knows  not  how  to  absolve  herself, 


wounded  will  he  fall, 

will  he  conquered  lie. 

that  Elias  shall  be  wounded. 

on  the  earth  drips  down, 

of  all  the  trees 

the  waters  are  dried  up  ; 

Heaven  consumes  in  flames  ; 

Mittelgard  burns  ; 

the    day  of  vengeance    dawns   on 

earth ; 
to  seek  the  sons  of  men. 
can  on  Muspelday  help  ; 
is  all  consumed, 
are  all  things  dissolved, 
which  brought  strife  among  men  ? 
but  the  burden  of  the  soul  remains, 
and  goeth  down  to  punishment. 


And   on    this  picture  of  the  world's  ending,   drawn  by  a 
Christian  pencil,  we  will  make,  too,  an  ending  of  this  volume. 


<s-2 

•s   c 

^    [V     fN 

^  ^00 

in      .     1 

g 

K  >   O 

_;  >   ^ 

r~ 

^  u_  00 

p 

<  o 

*-~i 

ffi  -J 

U^1 

'-0 

^ 

pa 

4 

cc 

o 

^ 

„    1 

co 
1 

K 

^ 

£  o 

S"  CO 

<*■ 

a 

^  x 

00  t3 

^ 

£ 

*  £ 

^ 

f-H 

-5r    i> 

«     V 

S    G 

f  ►> 

-^  a 

<w  1— 1 

o 

C/3 

<  oo 

PQ 

o 
^ 

£ 

SO 
U  ^ 

fq 

£jj 

th 

a 

^H 

cc 

_) 

H 

•A 

y> 

V  1- 

.  £  %  ^ 

_ '-3 

< 


< 


-  * 

c 

.»-3 


P5    O  'S 


U 


to    ">J  o      . 

fe   £   o   c3  r^ 


10  ^ 
•J    < 


C  •* 


O    J 

(5 


c  CO 


tL~^> 


C'H 


rt  00 

'     CO 


'to 


^00 


cJ 

"^ 

>   *^ 

rt  oo 

^ 

^  o 

£ 

.2  °° 

o     „ 

,'-    O 

CO 

~    X 

a 

£ 

W  x 

O    G 

^ 


■«^    o 


•^oo  r^^ 
-5oo  00  °g 

•  g    :°?io 
^-  ^^ 

>  ho  coo 

~>     «  C3  00 

w  to  .;  .»h    1 


< 
O    O 

-H-l 

< 


w 


r  00 
00 


pq 


1^ 


30 


. — 1    X  >— '      I       r^ 


-M    O    N 

a!     •  .5 

<  S-  rt 


Pi   pO 


CO 


=  £  A 


G    r  ao 


<u 


O 
h4 


o 
00 


w  _ 

<  j  &  2  ^ 

H-    ' Si.      IO 

^  -^  CO 

o 


ci  CO 

t:  '  - 

c   ^ 

K^   CO 


H 
O 


1-1        ^i>» 

00    £_£,  00 

^^".co" 


> 


^^      o 
O 


?>S 


8 

o 

fO 

Q 

CO 

1 

oo 

N 

SS 

M 

.^J 

T3 

o\ 

rt^3 

••> 

.2 

—  2  <« 

to 

'o 

p  ^ 

3 

c 

c  v> 

O 

rt 

W    W 

H 

£ 

^ 

<U 

o 

k/ 

J 

_  o 

->- 

o 

.  e 

fa: 

CO 

rt 

fai 

y 

< 

1— 1 

*t* 

^ 

5 

d 
o 
fa 

~ 

> 

fa 

u 

o 

2 

$ 

w 

i 

fal 

fa 

v. 

•> 

CO 

i * 

O 

i>  %< 

CO 
CO 

<fi 

g 

o 

Is  .2 

</2 

JA 

5 

H    ^ 

fa 

cc 

CO 

ON 

in 

w 

Pm 

fcX) 

CO 

£ 

s 

O 

3 

1 
CO 

CO 
CO 

< 

fa  

"5  " 

~z 

rt 

P 

o 

fa 

S3 

'o 

o 
U 

_fa 

o 
U 

-fa 
fa" 
o 

O 

fan 

fa 

C/3 

Q 

o 

fa           O 

o       <r 
—  C  —  ^ 

OS       O 

— i  CO 

fa 

fai 

^  CO 

o     . 

e  i 

Q 

O 

fa 

fa       fa 

-M 

B 

o 

D 


K 


^  fa 
•^  o 


3 


0 

^  fa 
*  t^ 
-i  co 

fa    I 

X  •& 


^ 


o 

X 
y3 


& 
& 


o 
z 


fa    rt  vo 

C  ~3\Q 

'fa     •_: 


O 

fa 
-fa 

o 
u 


G 

o 
d  rt  ^ 

•fa^  <>- 

<u 

3 
T3 


V     ON 


fa     -J 

faS 


c> 


^  a 

c 


Q 

o 


CO 

^J 

^O 

£ 

CO 

1 

N 

^ 

o 

CO 

s, 

•^. 

.  ™ 

fa 

k 

fa 

CO 
CO 

I 


H 

K 

fa  kQ 

fa  vO 
fa  CO 

'fa    O 

,     CO 


3 


W      ^ 


0 

fa    • 

<  9 
*.& 

E-  CO 


*! 


goo 

^  ^  CO 

9co    r 


US 


"0C 

Z    i 

<  CO 


en  co 


6J1 


CHRONOLOGICAL  TABLE. 

»**  The  entries  in  italics  are  those  of  events  not  directly  con- 
nected with  the  history  of  the  Vikings. 

The  names  within  square  brackets  are  those  of  t lie  countries  in  which  take 
place  the  events  recorded  in  the  preceding  entries,  or  to  whose  history  they 
belong. 

Anno 
Domini. 

789.  Attack  on  the  Dorset  coast  [England]. 

793.  ,,        ,,  Lindisfarne  [England]. 

794.  ,,        ,,  Monkwearmouth  ;  shipwreck  and  slaughter  of  the  Vikings 
[Engl.]. 

795.  Attack  on  Glamorganshire  ;  defeat  of  Vik.  [S.  Wales].   Att.  on  Rechru 

(Lambey)  [Ireland]. 

798.  Attack  on  Peel,  Isle  of  Man  [Engl.]. 

799.  ,,        ,,  Frisian  coast,  and  on  Aquitaine  ;   105  Vik.  slain  [Frank. 
Emp.]. 

800.  Charl-s  the  Greater.  Emperor.     Att.  on  Frisian  coast  and  isl.  [Frk. 

Emp.]. 
802.  Ace.  of  Ecgbert  k.  of  Wessex.     First  att.  on  Iona  [Scotland]. 

806.  Second  att.  on  Iona  [Scotl.]. 

807.  Att.  on  Inishmurray  and  Sligo ;  raid  into  Roscommon  [Ireland]. 

808.  Godfred  k.  of  Denmark  attacks  Abodriti  [Slavs]. 

810.  Godfred  desp.  fleet  (200  sail)  to  att.  Frisia ;  collects  army  to  invade 

Saxony  ;  slain  [Fr.  Emp.]. 

811.  Charlemagne  insp.  the  defences  of  W.  Francia  [Fr.  Emp.].     Vik.  def 

in  Ulster  [Ireland]. 

812.  Vik.  attacks  on  Owless,  Connemara,  and  W.  coast  of  Ireland  to  Cork. 

Vik.  def.  by  Eoganachts  of  Loch  Lein  ;  416  si.  [Ireland]. 

813.  Men  of  Owless  def.  by  Vik.  [Ireland]. 

814.  D.  of  Charles  the  Great.     Ace.  of  Lean's  the  Pious. 
81.8-20?  Norse  Vik.  begin  to  att.  islands  of  N.  Atlantic. 

820.  Atts.  on  Flanders  coast,   Seine,  and  Aquitaine  (13  sail)  [Fr.  Emp.]. 
Att.  begin  again  in  Ireland  (Isl.  in  Wexford  harb.).     [Irel.]. 


CHRONOLOGICAL  TABLE.  545 

A.D. 

822.   Atts.  on  Cork  harbour,  Beggary  Isl.,  and  Howth  [Ireland]. 

824.  Atts.  on  Skellig  Michil  and  Bangor  (Bennchair)  [Ireland]. 

825.  Aits,    in    Wexford    ha.,    on   Barrow,  Nore,   Waterford,    Blnckwater, 

Kinsale  Bay,  L'merick  [Irel.].  Third  att.  on  Iona,  Blaithmac  si. 
[Scotl.]. 

826.  Bapt.  of  ha?  aid  the  Da??e  at  Mainz  [Fr.  E??ip.].     Att.  on  Dublin  Co. 

(Lusca),  on  Ulster,  and  in  S.W.  [Irel.]. 

827.  Plund.  in  Leinster  and  Ulster  [Irel.].     Att.  on  Dalraida  [Scotl.]. 
828-9.  Plund.  on  N.  and  E.  coast  [Ireland]. 

830.  Anscar's  mission  to  Sweden.      Outbreak  of  reb.  in  Fr.  Emp.      [Fr. 
Enip.].     PI.  in  Louth  [Ireland]. 

832.  'Great  royal   flett '  (Turgesius  J  arrives  in  Ireland;  Vik.  victory  in 

Lough  Neaph.     [Irel.]. 

833.  1 he  '  hi 'eld  of  Lies. .'     [Fr.   Env\]   Ecgberht  holds  Witan  to  consider 

defences  ag.  Vik.  [Engl.].     Vik.  def.  at  Derry  [Irel.]. 

834.  first  Chr.  ch.  btcilt  in  Sweden.     First  grt.  Vik.  exp.  against  Frisia  ; 

Utrecht  and  Dorstad  pi.  Alarm  at  mouth  of  Loire  [Fr.  Emp.]. 
Ravaging  all  round  Irish  coasts  [Irel.]. 

835.  Dorstad  pi.  j  def.  of  Vik.     Ct.  Rainald  fights  with  Vik.  at  Noirmou- 

tiers  [Fr.  Emp.].  Vik.  att.  Sheppey  [Engl.].  Mon.  of  Louth  rav. ; 
Clonmicnois  bnt.  ;  Ferns  and  Clonmore  pi.  (Xmas  night)  [Irel.]. 

836.  Dorstad,  Antwerp,  Witla,  &c,  pi.    Honk's  ambass.  si.  in  Cologne  [Fr. 

Emp.].  Vik.  (35  sail)  def.  Eng.  at  Charmouth  [Engl.].  Two  Vik. 
fl.  of  60  sail  up  Boyne  and  Liffey  [Irel.]. 

837.  Dorstad,  Walcheren,  &C,  pi.;  Lewis  march,  into  Frisia  ;  holds  council 

at  Nymuegen  [Fr.  Emp.].  Vik.pl.  in  Connaught  and  Limerick; 
fight  with  men  of  Bray,  Saxnlf  si.  [Irel.]. 

838.  Vik.  ships  wrecked  on  Fris.  coast  [Fr.  Emp.].    Bat.  of  Hengstone,  def. 

of  Vik.  and  Cornishmen  [Engl.].     First  taking  of  Dublin  [Irel.]. 
838  or  9.  Death  of  Ecgberht  ;  acc.of  yEthehvuIf[Y.r\g\.]. 

839.  Danes  and  Slavs  in  conj.  invade  Saxony  [Fr.  Emp.]. 

840.  Death  of  E?np.  Lewis  [Fr.  Emp.].     Ealdorman  Wulfheard  def.  Vik. 

(33  sail)  at  Southampton  ;  Eald.  ^Ethelhelm  def.  and  si.  by  V.  at 
Portland  [Engl.].     Vik.  pi.  in  Lough  Neagh  [Irel.]. 

841.  Bat.  of  Fontenoy.     Oscar's  Vik.  fl.  pi.  Rouen  and  threat.  Jumieges 

[West  Francia].  Vik.  in  marsh  country  ;  Eald.  Hereberht  si. ;  in 
Lindsay  and  East  Anglia,  and  in  Kent  [Engl.].  Vik.  pi.  in  Lough 
Neagh  [Irel.]. 

842.  Vik.  att.  Quentovic,  HanwigPand  Northanwig?  [W.  Francia]  Arle 

fl.  by  Corsairs  [Lothair's  k.].     London  and  Rochester  pi.  [Engl.]. 

843.  T?eaty  of  Verdun.     [Fr.  Emp.].     Oscar,  in  all.  with  Nominoi,  D.  of 

Brittany  and  Ct.  Lambert,  pi.  Nantes.  Vik.  winter  in  France  1st 
time  [W.  Franc].  Turgesius  takes  Leth  Cuinn.  Ota  in  minster  of 
Clonmicnois  [Irel.]. 

844.  Quentovic  pi.  (2nd  time) ;  Oscar's  fl.,  in  all.  with  Wm.  of  Septimania 

and  Pippin  of  Aquitaine,  att.  Toulouse  [W.  Fr.]  ;  sails  to  Asturias 
and  down  W.  coast  of  Moham.  Spain  [Spain].  Limerick  pi., 
Clonmicnois  bint.  [Irel.]. 

36 


546  CHRONOLOGICAL  TABLE. 


A  D. 


845.  Horik  desp.   fleet  ag.  Hamburg  (600  sail)  [Germ.]  ;  another  under 

Ragnar  (Lodbrok  ?)  ag.  Paris  (120  sail);  miracle.  Vik.  ret.  from 
Sp.,  def.  Christ,  and  pi.  Saintes  [W.  Franc.].  Great  def.  of  Vik.  at 
Ith  (Earl  Onfil  si.).     Turgesius  drowned  in  Lough  Owel  [Irel.]. 

846.  Rome  att.  by  C0rsa.i1  s  and  Borgo pi.  [Italy].     Dorstad  pi.  [Lotharingia]. 

Noirmoutier  burnt  [\V.  Fr.].  Vik.  def.  on  Parret  by  Eald.  Eanwulf 
and   Osric   and   Bp.    Ealhstan.   [Engl.].      Naval   vict.  over   Vik. 

tIrel']-    .  . 

847.  Anscar  reinst.  in  Hamburg  ;  friendly  policy  of  Horik,  K.  of  Denm. 

[Germ.]  Vik.  sail  9  miles  above  Dorstad  [Loth.].  Herbauge  bnt. 
by  Loire  Vik.  ;  Nominoi  unsuc  att.  Loire  Vik.  ;  Bordeaux  bes.  by 
Oscar  [W.  Fr.].     Dubl.  Vik.  (1,200)  under  Hakon  si.  [Irel.]. 

848.  Aquitainians  su'ni.     Vik.  ships  on  Garonne  capt.   by  Charles  ;  Bor- 

deaux falls  to  Vik.  [W.  Fr.]. 

849.  Luna  pi.  by  Corsairs  [Ital.].     Leivis  Germ.  def.  by  Bohem.     [Germ.]. 

'The  Northmen  continued  to  gain  in  strength'  (An.Xan.)  [Lothar.]. 
700  Vik.  si.  in  Meath  ;  1,200  Vik.  under  Jarl  Torer  si.  [Irel.]. 

850.  Rorik,  Harald's  neph.,  and  Godfred,  Hara'd's  son,  pi.  in  Frisia  ;  rest. 

by  Lothair  to  fief  Walcheren ;  Aries  and  other  towns  pi.  by  Sara- 
cens [Lothar.].  Oscar  and  Godfred,  Harald's  son,  pi.  in  Flanders 
(Therouanne,  Ghent)  ;  in  Seine.  Seine  Vik.  entrench,  in  '  Givoldi 
fossa  '  250  days  [W.  Francia]  ;  Rorik's  fleet  (350  s. )  pi.  Cant,  and 
London  ;  Berhtulf  def.  and  si.  ^Ethelwulf  def.  Rorik's  Vik.  at 
Ockley.  Battles  of  Wembury  and  Sandwich  (naval) — Eng.  vict. 
Vik.  winter  in  Thanet — 1st  wintering  in  England  [Engl.]. 

851.  Sec.  meeting  at  AJeersen  [Fr.  Emp.].     Vik.  sail   up  Elbe  and  make  a 

severe  att.  on  Saxony  [Germ.].  Death  of  Nominoi ;  victory  of 
Bretons  over  Ch.  the  Bald.  Vik.  burn  Beauvais  ;  defd.  on  Epte 
[W.  Fr.].  Danish  fl.  in  Irish  waters.  Bat.  of  Carlingford  Bay  bet. 
Danes  and  Norsemen.     Danish  vict.  [Irel.]. 

852.  Fl.  (250  s.)  att.  Frisia,  obt.  ransom  [Lothar.]  ;  Lothair  and  Charles  the 

Bald  prop,  to  att.  Seine  Vik.  Charles  makes  terms  with  Godfred. 
Vik.  pi.  Fontanelle.  Godfred  and  Sihtric  in  Givoldi  fossa,  in  250 
ships  rav.  Seine  country  (3rd  exp.  up  Seine)  ;  Oscar  def.  Cts. 
Rainald  and  Reno  at  Briliacum  (Aquit.)  and  then  ret.  to  Bordeaux 
[W.  Fr.]. 

853.  Vik.  under  Sihtric  in  Loire;  make  winter  camp.     St.  Florentatt.; 

Nantes  att.  and  brnt ;  Tours  and  Marmoutier  bnt.  [W.  Fr.]  Eald. 
Huda  and  Ealhere  with  fyrd  of  Kent  and  Surrey  att.  Vik.  in 
Thanet  without  effect  [Engl.].  Olaf  the  White  overk.  in  Ireland 
[Irel.]. 

854.  Civil  war  in  Denmark  ;    Horik  II.   king  [Germ.].      E.   Frisia  att. 

[Lothar.].  Loire  Vik.  att.  Angers  and  Blois  ;  def.  before  Orleans. 
Vik.  atts.  less  num.  this  year  [W.  Fr.]. 

855.  Death  of  Emp.  Lothair.     Frisia  becomes  a  perm,  home  of  Vik.  under 

Rorik  and  Godfred  [Lothar.].  Sihtric  with  105  sail  settled  on  isl. 
of  Loire.  Sihtric  and  Bjorn  up  Seine  to  Pitres.  Vik.  def.  in 
Perche.  Siht.  leaves  Seine  ;  Bjorn  entrenches  himself.     [\V.  Fr.]. 


CHRONOLOGICAL   TABLE.  547 

A.D. 

Vik.  under  ITalfdan,  Ivar,  and  Ubbe  remove  camp  fr.  Thanet  to 
Sheppey  [Engl.]. 

856.  Partition  of  Orbe  [Lothar.].     Sihtric  pi.  Orleans.    New  fleet  in  Seine  ; 

2nd  att.  on  Paris  [W.  Fr.].  Mar.  of  ALthelwulf  and  Judith.  Reb. 
of  AZthelbald  [Eng.].     Gall-Gaedhil  first  mentioned  [Irel.]. 

857.  Murder  of  Erispoi,  D.  of  Brittany.     Loire  Vik.  pi.  Blois  and  Tours 

(2nd  att.).     Pippin  of  Aquit.  joins  Vik.  [\V.  Fr.).     Olaf  and  Ivar 
slaugh.  Gaedhil  and  Gall-Gaedhil  [Irel.]. 
857-8.  Vik.  plun.  in  Frisia  (B.xtavian  isl. ).    The  churches  of  Utrecht  destr. 
[Lothar.]. 

858.  Nicholas  I.   Pope   [dial.].     Vik.    (Rorik's?)   make   att.   on   Saxony; 

driven  back  ;  Bremen  pi.  [Germ.].  Baltfred,  Bp.  of  Bayeaux  si. 
by  Vik.  Bjorn  does  horn,  to  Ch.  the  Bald.  Charles  the  B.  and 
Lothair  II.  bes.  Vik.  in  Ossel.  Lewis  the  G.  invades  W. 
Francia.  Loire  Vik.  capt.  Chartres  [W.  Fr.].  Death  of  sEthehvu/f 
\Engl.\ 

859.  Chart,  rest,  in  W.  Fr.     Robert  the  Str.  att.  Lewis,  s.  of  Ch.  the  Bald. 

Vik.  in  Scheld  (S.  Valerie  Abb.  pi.)  ;  and  in  Somme  (Amiens  pi.). 
Immo,  Bp.  of  Noyon,  and  Erminfred,  Bp.  of  Beauvais  si.  by  Vik. 
Peasants  of  Loire  country  att.  Vik.  ;  their  own  lords  take  pt. 
against  them  [W.  Fr.].  Hasting  and  Bjorn  (70  si.)  make  exp.  to 
Asturias,  Moh.  Spain,  Africa,  and  Camargue  [Sp.]. 

860.  Hast,  and  Bjorn  attack  Luna  [Ital.]     Vik.  in  Rhine  [Loth.].     Vik.  in 

Somme  (under  Weland)  and  Seine.  Charles  attempts  to  bribe 
Weland  to  att.  V.  of  Se'ne  [W.  Francia].  Weland  (200  si.)  sails  to 
Eng.  and  pi.  Winchester.  Men  of  Hamp.  and  Berksh.  def.  Vik. 
[Engl.].      Vik.  under  Hona  and  Tomrir  att.  Limerick  [Irel.]. 

861.  Therouanne  pi.    St.  Omer  pi.     Seine  (Oissel)  Vik.  make  3rd  and  4th 

att.  on  Paris.  Weland  ret.  (200  sail),  and  bes.  Vik.  in  Oissel  ; 
allows  them  to  withdraw  on  payment  of  fine.  Oissel  Vik.  enlist 
under  Weland's  son  and  settle  in  St.  Maur.  Weland  pi.  Melun. 
Hast,  and  Bjorn  ret.  to  France  ( ? )  [W.  Fr.].  Olaf  and  Aedh.  pi.  in 
Meath  ;  def.  by  Malachy  [Irel.]. 

862.  Vik.  att.  Saxony  [Germ-].     Rorik  ret.  to  Frisia  [Lothar.].     Vik.  from 

St.  Maur  pi.  Meaux.  Weland  sails  away,  ret.,  and  is  bapt. 
Seine  Vik.  all.  with  Bretons  ;  bribed  by  Ct.  Robert  to  give  up 
alliance  [W.  Fr.].     Olaf  and  Aedh.  pi.  in  Meath  [Irel.]. 

863.  Vik.    def.   by  Saxons  [Germ.].     Vik.  sail  up  Rhine  to  Dorstad  and 

thence  to  Xanten  (miracle)  [Lothar.].  Baldwin  of  Fl.  mar.  Judith. 
Salomon  does  horn,  to  Ch.  Vik.  unsucc.att.  by  Ct.  Turpio,  of  Angou- 
mois.  Poictiers  threat,  by  Vik.  [W.  Fr.].  Death  of  Malachy  I. 
Aedh.  succ.  [Irel.]. 

864.  Vik.  att.  Saxony  [Germ.].    Rudolf,  Harald's  son,  bribed  to  def.  Frisia 

[Lothar.].  Vik.  att.  Flanders  ;  driven  off  by  Baldwin  [W.  Fr.]  ;  ret. 
to  Frisia  [Lotha*-.].  Council  of  Pitres.  Fortif.  of  Pitres  and  Paris. 
Wide  pi.  of  Loire  Vik.  (Poictiers,  Angouleme,  Perigueux, 
Limoges,  Clermont,  Bourges,  laid  waste  about  this  time).  Robert 
the  Strong  fought  two  battles  with  Loire  Vik.,  1st  Vik.  def.,  2nd 


548  CHRONOLOGICAL  TABLE. 

A.D. 

R.  wounded.     Domestic  affairs  begin  to  improve  in  W.  F.     A  qui 
tanians  submit  to  Charles  the  B.  [W.  Fr.]. 

865.  Anscar   ag.   abp.  of  Hamburg  unit,    with    Bremen;    dies   [Germ.]. 

Vik.  (50  s.)  again  on  Seine ;  att.  Chartres,  but  are  def.  and  si. ; 
Vik.  under  Baret  pi.  Orleans  (2nd  time),  and  then  att.  Fleury 
Abbey.  Loire  Vik.  att.  and  burn  Le  Mans  and  Poictiers  ;  def.  by 
Cts.  Gozfrid  and  Heriveus.  Seigfred's  Vik.  def.  on  Charente  (Not 
again  so  far  to  the  south).  [W.  Fr.].  Vik.  come  to  Thanet  and 
winter  there  [Engl.]. 

866.  Vik.  settle  by  Yssel  [Loth.].     Seine  Vik.  come  to  Melun ;  def.  by  Ct. 

Robert  and  Odo  ;  aft.  rec.  bribe  from  Ch.  Fortif.  of  Pitres  pressed 
forw.  4,000  lb.  silver  pd.  to  Loire  Vik.  Robert  the  S.  and  Ram- 
nulfsl.  by  Hasting  [W.  Fr.].  Vik.  from  Thanet  rav.  in  Kent.  Gt, 
Army  sails  for  marsh  country  [Engl.].  Vik.  def.  in  Cork.  harb. 
Aedh.  pi.  the  strongholds  of  the  Norsemen  [Irel.j.  Olaf  pi.  Pict- 
land  (N.W.  Scot.)  [Scotl.]. 

867.  Nicholas    I.  d.  ;   Hadrian  II.    Pope  [Ital.].      Rorik   driven    out    of 

Frisia  [Lothar.].  Bourges  pi.  [W.  Fr.].  Army  marches  N.  and 
takes  York  [Engl.].  Quarrel  bet.  three  Vik.  leaders  (Olaf,  Ivan, 
and  Oisla)  [Ireland].     Vik.  pi.  in  Scotland  [Scotland]. 

868.  Franks  and  Bretons  unite  ag.  Loire  Vik.  under  Hasting.      Salomon 

ackn.  King  of  Brittany.  Vik.  rec.  daneg.  fr.  Orleans  [W.  Fr.]. 
Gt.  Army  attacked  in  York  ;  def.  of  Eng.,  Osberht  and  yElla  si. 
Vik.  make  Ecgberht  K.  of  Na. ;  plunder  in  Bernicia.  Army 
marches  fr.  York  to  Nottingham  ;  bes.  by  Burgred,  k.  of  Mercia, 
with  aid  of  ^Ethelred,  k.  of  Wessex,  and  /Elfred.  Danes  ret.  to 
York  [Engl.]. 

869.  Death  of  Lothair  II.  [Loth.].     Bretons  under  Salomon  make  peace 

with  Loire  Vik.  Men  of  Poitou  def.  Loire  Vik.  [VV.  Fran.].  Gt. 
Army  rem.  at  York  [Engl.]. 

870.  Treaty  of  Meerseti  [Germ,  and  W.  Fr.].  Rorik  has  conf.  with  Charles 

B.  [W.  F.].  Army  div.  into  two  ;  (1)  wint.  Thetford  ;  (2)  Sails  to 
Lindsay.  Bardeney,  Crowland,  Peterborough,  Huntingdon,  Cam- 
bridge, Ely,  pi.  ;  (1)  div.  att.  Eadmund ;  martyrd.  of  Eadmund  k. 
of  East  Anglia  [Eng.].  '  Ireland  has  peace  from  the  Foreigners  for 
40  yrs.'  {Gaill)  [Irel.].     Olaf  and  Ivar  bes.  Dumbarton  [Scotl.]. 

871.  Bari jails  to  Emp.  lezvis  II.  [Ital.].     Hugo  and  Gauzfrid  att.  Loire 

Vik.  [W.  Fr.].  Army  crosses  Thames  and  makes  camp  at  Reading; 
Eng.  vict.  at  Englefield  ;  Eng.  defeat  and  flight  to  Wistley  Green. 
Bat.  of  Ashdown,  grt.  Vik.  defeat  ;  fall  of  k.  Bregsaeg  and  5  earls. 
Eng.  def.  at  Basing  and  Merton.  Death  of  Aithelred.  ALlfred 
siuc.  Bat.  of  Wilton  and  def.  of  Eng.  Danegeld  pd.  to  Vik.  Army 
wint.  in  London.     Mercian  k.  Burgred  p.  Danegeld  [Engl.]. 

872.  Death  of  Hadrian  ;  Jolin  VIII.   Pope.     Gt.  vict.  of  lewis  the  Emp. 

over  Saracens  [Jtal.\.      Charles  the    B.    has  second  confer,  with 
Rorik  and  Rudolf,  Vik.  leaders.     Rorik  does  horn.  [W.  Fr.]    Army 
in  London  [Engl.]. 
C73.  Last  ment.of  any  Dan.  kings  for  50  yrs.  in  Fr.  chron.  [Denm.].  Rorik 


CHRONOLOGICAL  TABLE.  549 


a. a 


att.  Frisia  and  def.  (Rudolf,  Haralds's  son,  and  800  m.  si.)  [Loth.]. 
Ch.  prep,  exped.  against  Loire  Vik.,  andincomp.  with  Bretons  bes. 
them  in  Angers  [W.  Fr.].  Army  goes  to  Torksey  (Lincolnsh.) 
Death  of  Ivar.  [Engl.]. 

874.  Zwentibold ackn.  Duke  of Moravia[Germ.].   Salomon  murd.   [W.  Fr.']. 

Army  goes  fr.  Torksey  to  Repton,  and  takes  winter  quarters  there. 

875.  Death  of  E  nip.  Lewis.     Charles  the  Bald  c>\  Emperor  {Dec. ).    [Italy]. 

Part  of  Army  under  HaKdan  settl.  in  Northa.  Another  part  under 
Guthorm,  &c.,  wint.  at  Cambridge  [Engl.].  Oistin  (Thorstein)  pi. 
in  Scotl.  and  killed  there  [Scot'  ]. 

876.  Death  of  Leivis  Germ.     Battle  of  Andernach  ;  Ch.  the  B.  def.  by  Leivis 

the  Yr.  [Germ.].  Vik.  def.  by  W.  Frisians  [Loth.].  Vik.  ag. 
in  Seine  (100  s.)  [W.  Fr.].  Guthorm's  army  unexp.  sis.  round  to 
Wareham.  Bes.  by  Alfred  ;  steals  to  Exeter.  Vik.  fl.  def.  at 
Swanage  [Engl.]. 

877.  Danegeld  (5,000  lb.  silver)  pd.  to  Seine  Vik.  ;  another  daneg.  pd.  to 

Loire  Vik.  Council  of  Quiersy.  Ordinances  concern,  fortif.  of 
Pitres,  Paris,  &c.  Death  of  Charles  the  Bald.  Leivis  the  Stammerer 
sue.  [W.  Fr.].  Guthorm's  army  marches  from  Exeter  to  Chip- 
penham. Def.  of  Vik.  at  '  Cynwith.'  Breakdown  of  Eng.  resist. 
yElfred  on  yEthelney  [Engl.].  Bat.  in  Strangford  Lough  bet. 
Northumbr.  Danes  and  Irish  Vik.  [Irel.]. 

878.  St.  Omer  bnt.  by  Vik.     Hugo  and  Lewis  the  St.  fgt.  ag.   Loire  Vik. 

[W.  Fr.].  Alfred  coll.  army  of  men  of  Ilamps.,  Wilts.,  and  Somers. 
and  enc.  Guth.  army  at  .^Ethandune  (Eddington?).  Vik.  def.  and  bes. 
in  Chippenham  ;  Peace  of  Wed  more  ;  East  Anglia  given  to 
Guthor.n-.'Ethelstan.  Prt.  of  Vik.  army  settl.  at  Cirencester. 
Fresh  Vik.  army  comes  to  Fulham. 
79.  Charles  the  Fat,  Emp.  [Italy].  Death  of  Leivis  Stam.  Leivis  and 
Carloman  succ.  Army  fr.  Eng.  (Fulham)  ret.  to  Flanders;  St. 
Omer,  Therouanne  and  Ghent,  pi.  ;  Vik.  unsucc.  att.  by  Hugo  of 
Lothar. ;  army  winters  in  Fl.  L.  and  C.  gain  victory  over  Loire 
Danes  on  the  Vienne  [W.  Fr.].  Boso  cr.  King  of  Burgundy 
[Burgundy], 

880.  Lewis  Sax.   makes  2nd  inv.  of    W.    Francia.      Peace  of  Ribemont 

bet.  kings  of  E.  and  IV.  Francia  [Germ,  and  W.  Fr.].  Death  of 
Carlman  of  Bav.  Lewis  the  Sax.  att.  Fland.  Vik.  under  Godfred 
at  Thuin  on  the  Sambre,  and  def.  them  ;  but  fails  to  follow  up 
victory.  Vik.  def.  and  annih.  Saxon  army  under  Bruno  on  Liine- 
burg  Heath.  Vik.  sail  up  Rhine  to  Xante n  and  winter  at  Nymuegen 
[Germ.1].  Abbt.  Gozlin  att.  Vik.  from  Ghent  but  is  def.  Vik.  harry 
whole  distr.  bet.  Scheld  and  Somme  [\V.  Fr.J.  Unsucc.  siege  of 
Vienne  [Burgundy]. 

881.  Vik.  in  Frisia  under  Godfred  and  Siegfred  form  camp  at  Ashloh  (Els- 

loo)  Thence  they  pi.  Aix,  Cologne,  and  other  towns  on  Riiine  : 
pass  New  Yr.'s  Day  at  Priim  [Germ.].  Vik.  leave  their  camp  at 
Courtray  and  ravage  country  bet.  Scheld  and  Somme  ;  cross  into 
France  proper ;  decis.  def.  by  Lewis  at  Saucourt  [W.  Fr.]. 


55°  CHRONOGICAL  TABLE. 


A.D. 


882.  Death  of  Lewis  the  Saxon.  Ashloh  Vik.  rav.  county  of  Mosel.  Charles 

the  Fat  assembl.  troops  at  Worms.  At  news  of  appr.  of  Charles, 
Vik.  retire  to  Ashloh;  besieged  by  Charles;  receive  heavy  bribe 
from  Emp.  Godf.  is  bapt.  and  mar.  Hugo's  sister,  Gisla.  [Germ.]. 
Lewis  k.  of  W.  Fr.  att.  Hasting  and  Vik.  of  the  Loire,  who  leave 
this  stream  not  to  ret.  till  circ.  903.  Death  of  Lexvis  k.  of  W. 
Ft.  Siegfred's  Vik.  leave  Meuse  and  come  up  Scheld  to  Conde.  Vik. 
leave  Conde  and  (Abbot  Hugo  having  gone  to  meet  Charles  the  Fat 
at  Worms)  they  march  through  wc\  ol  Thierache  to  Laon ;  thence 
to  Rheims;  flight  of  Hincmar.  Met  by  Carloman  and  def.  at 
Avaux  sur  Aisne  ;  they  return  to  Conde.  Death  of  Hincmar  [W. 
Fr.]. 
882-3.  (Winter)  Vik.  on  Conde  ravage  far  and  near,  to  Scarpe  and  Somme 
[W.  Fr.]. 

883.  Hugo  of  Lothar.  intrigues  with  Godfred.     Fresh  Vik.  fleet  comes  to 

Frisia,  settl.  in  Duisberg.  Duke  Henry  gains  some  vict.  over  Vik. 
[Germ.].  Carloman  unable  to  keep  the  field  before  Vik.  who  make 
winter  camp  at  Amiens. 

884.  Vik.  army   def.  at  Norden   by  Frisians  and  Saxons  under  Rimbert 

(10,000  si.?)  [Germ.].  Vik.  in  Amiens  accept  bribe  of  12,000  lb. 
to  leave  W.  Francia  ;  some  go  to  Engl.,  some  to  Louvain.  Death 
of  Carloman  [W.  Fr.].  Vik.  from  AY.  Fr.  bes.  Rochester,  assist, 
by  Guthorm  of  East  Angl  a  ;  Rochester  rel.  by  /Elfred,  who  also 
sends  fleet  to  att.  Danes  in  East  Anglia  (Stour)  and  takes  16  ships. 
885-  Godfred  makes  furth.  demands  for  territory  ;  invit.  to  a  conference  by 
Rhine  and  there  mur.  by  Ct.  Everard.  Hu0o  taken  blinded  and 
impr.  in  Prum  [Germ.].  Vik.  return  from  Louvain  to  France 
hearing  of  death  of  Carloman.  Siegfred  and  Danes  sail  for  Seine  ; 
att.  Rouen  (1st  att.  for  44  yrs.)  ;  begin  siege  of  Paris  [W.  Fr.]. 

886.  Siege  of  Paris  continued.     Siegfred    withdr.    from    siege.     Death    of 

D.  Henry.  Charles  the  Fat  adv.  on  Paris  ;  siege  part,  raised  ;  Vik. 
bribed  to  retire.     Vik.  in  Upper  Burgundy  [W.  Fr.]. 

887.  Vik.  ret.  from  Burjy.  ;  checked  by  Bp.  Anscheric  and   Abb.  Ebolus  ; 

sail  up  Marne  ;  take  Mcaux  and  Troyes  [W.  Fr.].  Death  of  Boso  k. 
of  Lower  Burgundy  [Burg.].  Deposition  of  Charles  the  Bat. 
Arnulf  elect,  k.  of  Germany  [Germ]. 

888.  Odo  elect,  k.  of  W.  Francia.     Rudolf  elect,  k.  of  Upper  Burgundy. 

Berengamus  elect,  k.  of  Italy.  Vik.  pi.  round  Verdun,  Toul,  and 
Rheims.  Vik.  def.  by  Odo  at  Montfaucon.  Vik.  again  before 
Paris  ;  pi.  Champagne. 

1  By  the  Treaty  of  Ribemont  the  kingdom  of  Lewis  the  Saxon  was  extended  as  far  as 
he  Scheld. 


INDEX. 


Abd-er-Rahman,  Caliph  of  Cor- 
dova, 283. 
Abbio,  Saxon  leader,  136. 
Abbo,   monk,    his    account    of   the 

Siege  of  Paris,  471  sqq. 
Abodriti,  or  Obotriti,  the,  129,  134, 

150,  182,  300,  323,  510. 
Abu-Merwan,  Arab  general,  246. 
Aclea,  see  Ockley. 
Acre  of  the  Immortals,  see  o'dains- 

acre. 
Adalbert,  Abbot  of  St.  Bertin,  322. 
Adalhard,  Count,  348  note. 
Adalgis,  Duke  of  Beneventum,  415, 

419. 
Adam  of  Bremen,  40,  45. 
Adelis  or  Adelais,  343. 
Ad' I i la,  Abbess  of  Herford,  508  note. 
1  Adoptians,'  The,  425. 
^gir,  Northern  sea-god,    128,   277 

note. 
Alfred,  the  Great,  K.  of  the  West 

Saxons,  216,  327,  347,  368,   376 

W->  3S5,  396  sqq.,  495  ;  see  also 

Genealogical  Table. 
1  /Elfre  Is  and  Guthrums  FriS,'  402, 

403  and  note. 
/Ella,  King   of  Northumbria,  289, 

365  7-f  374-5- 


/Esir,  69  ;  see  also  Asa. 
/Ethandune,  battle  of,  401  and  note, 

403- 

^thelbald,  King  of  Mercia,  138. 

iEthelbald,  King  of  Wessex,  306, 
369,  412,  413  ;  see  also  Genea- 
logical Table. 

/Ethelberht,  King  of  Wessex,  371  ; 
see  also  Genealogical  Table. 

/Ethelney,  400-1. 

.^Luhelred,  King  of  Wessex,  yjdsqq., 
385,  388  ;  see  also  Genealogical 
Table. 

/Ethelred,  enldorman,  376. 

viithelstan,  King,  164  ;  see  also  Ge- 
nealogical Table. 

/Ethelstan  (Guthorm-)  403  ;  see  also 
Guthorm. 

./Ethelswyth,  376. 

iEthelthryth,  381. 

/Ethelwulf,  K.  of  Wessex,  276,  306, 
327,  353.  368-70,  412;  see  also 
Genealogical  Table. 

/Ethelwulf,  ealdorman,  385. 

Africa,  90. 

Agantyr,  mythic  hero,  80. 

Agnar,  mythic  liero,  63. 

A^obard,     Archbishop    of    Lyons, 

"242-3. 5°5'  5°7>  Vl< 


552 


INDEX. 


Agricola,  campaigns  of,  15- 
Aidan,  St.,  114,  142-3. 
Aix-la-Chapelle,  128,  218,  237  ;  diet 

at,   247  ;  plundered   by   Vikings, 

452;  synods  at,  519. 
Aizo,  a  Goth,  246. 
Alamanni,  Alamannia,   127-8,  240, 

248. 
Almi,  the,  99. 
Alar  or  Aller,  the,  136,  508. 
Alaric,  89. 

Alban,  kingdom  of,  494,  495. 
Alberic,  monk,  vision  of,  109. 
Albio,  see  Abbio. 
Alboin,  426. 
Alcuin,  Abbot  of  Marmoutier,  141, 

H3.  313- 

Algar,  ealdorman,  378-9. 

Algezira,  plundered  by  Vikings,  361. 
Aliso,  Roman  town,  16,  132,  210. 
Altar  of    Rome   and    Augustus  at 

Lyons,  3,  125. 
Altdorf,  245. 
Amalungs,  the,  66. 
America,    Irish    monks    in?    209  ; 

Norsemen  in,  498. 
Amund  (Hamund,  Anwynd),  Viking 

leader,  397. 
Andernach,  battle  of,  434  sqq.,  438, 

444. 
Andgisl,  King  of  Frisia,  1 16-7. 
Angles,  settlement  of,  in  Britain,  100. 
Angli,  the,  20. 
Angrarii  or  Engern,  the   (Saxons), 

45,  68,  129. 
Anjou,  Counts  of,  see  Hugo,  Robert. 
Anjou,  county  of,  344,  413. 
Anlaf,  see  Olaf. 
Anscar  or  Ansgar,  missionary  to  the 

Scandinavians     and     Archbishop 

of  Hamburg,  228-9,  272>  285-6, 

298,  315-6,  464,  507. 
Ansgard,  wife  of  Lewis  the  Stam- 
merer, 412. 
Anthony,  St.,  99. 
Antichrist,  fights  with  Elias  at  end 

of  the  world,  540. 
Antwerp,  plundered  by  Vikings,  274. 


Anulo,  pretender  to  throne  of  S. 
Jutland,  219,  286. 

Anwynd,  see  Amund. 

Aquitaiv,  Aquitanii,  153,  240,  243, 
228,318-9,322,341,433. 

Aquitaine,  see  Aquitani ;  King  of,  see 
Charles,  King  of  Aquitaine. 

Arab  corsairs,  362 ;  see  also  Saracens. 

Arc,  valley  of  the,  death  of  Charles 
the  Bald  in,  441. 

Architecture,  214,  22^. 

Ardhaccan,  Vikings  defeated  at,  199. 

Ard-macha,  see  Armagh. 

Ardradus,  Christian  champion,  478 
note. 

Ard-ri  or  over-king  of  Ireland,  188, 
204. 

Aribo,  Count,  462. 

Ariovistus,  60-1  ;  wife  of,  61,  63. 

Aries,  Bishop  of,  slain  by  Saracens, 
362  ;  plunder  of,  by  Vikings,  422  ; 
kingdom  of,  4S6  ;  see  also  Bur- 
gundy (Lower). 

Armagh,  plundered  by  Vikings,  175. 

Arminius,  44,  102. 

Armorica,  240  ;  see  also  Brittany. 

Army,  the  Great,  371,  373  sqq. 

Arnold,  Christian  champion,  478 
note. 

Avnolf  of  Carinthia,  son  of  Carlo- 
man,  afterwards  King  of  Ger- 
many, 424,  443,  451,  456,  462, 
489. 

Arnulf,  St.,  of  Metz,  216,  506. 

Arrows,  see  Weapons  of  Vikings. 

Arthur's  Chase,  533  ;  see  also  Wild 
Huntsman., 

Asa-burg  or  Asa-gard,  69. 

Asbjorn,  Viking  leader,  386. 

Asbru,  70. 

Ascrich,  Bishop  of  Paris,  486. 

^  sgeirr,  277  note  ;  see  also  Oscar. 

Ash  and  Elm,  creation  of  man  from, 
27. 

Ash'lown,  battle  of,  386  sqq. 

Ashloh  or  Elsloo,  Viking  camp  at, 
453  ;  besieged  by  Charles  the  Fat, 
456,  460,  485. 


INDEX. 


553 


Aslang,  6l,  289. 

Asseroe,  Vikings  defeated  at,  199. 

Asturias,  kingdom  of,  attacked  by 
Vikings,  282,  360. 

Athanaric,  39,  100,  1 17. 

Ath-Cliath  or  Dublin,  198. 

Attigny,  baptism  of  Widukind  at, 
136. 

And,  'the  wise,'  493. 

Augustine,  St.,  Archbishop  of  Can- 
terbury, 114. 

Aurinia,  61,  64. 

Aurora  borealis,  79. 

Autbert,  missionary  to  Danes,  229. 

Auvergne,  Vikings  in,  354. 

Avon,  Vikings  on,  400. 

Axe,  see  Weaj  ons  of  Vikings. 

B/egseg,  Viking  leader,  379,  386. 
Balder,  52-3,  73,  383,  528-9. 
Balderic,  Count  of  Friuli,  220,  237» 
Baldwin  of  the  iron  arm,  the  Forester, 

Count    of    Flanders,    342,    347, 

353,  413,  426-7. 
Baltfrid,  Bishop  of  Bayeux,  killed 

by  Vikings,  334. 
Baltic,  the,  21,  23. 
Ban  or  hereban,  the,  324. 
B  mdon,  Vikings  on  the,  195. 
Bangor   monastery,  93  ;    plundered 

by  Vikings,  193. 
Bann,  Vikings  on  the,  196. 
Baptism,  feeling  of  heathen  towards, 

136,  211,  295. 
Bardeney  Abbey,    372 ;    plundered 

by  Vikings,  377. 
Bari,  siege  of,    414-5  ;    Sultan   of, 

see  Suliman. 
Barritus,  sound  of  the,  48,  477. 
Basilicas,  213. 
Basing,  battle  of,  388. 
Basques,  the,  240. 
Batavian  Island,  465. 
Battering  ram,  use  made  of,  473. 
Bavaria,  1 19,  128,  240,  243  ;  see  also 

Arnolf,  Carloman,  Lewis  the  Ger- 
man, &c. 
Bang,  holy,  oath  on,  398  note. 


Bavo,  St.,  Abbey  of,  plundered  by 
Vikings,  303. 

Bayeux,  Bishop  of,  see  Baltfrid. 

Beauvais,  Erminfrid,  Bishop  of,  slain 
by  Vikings,  334. 

Beda,  115,  126,  139,  227. 

Beggary  Island,  Vikings  on,  193. 

Benedict,  St.,  rule  of,  89. 

Benedict  of  Aniana,  St.,  507. 

Beneventum,  dukedom  of,  414  ; 
see  also  Adalgis. 

Bennchair,  see  Bangor. 

Beowulf,  mythic  hero,  123,  167, 
174. 

Beozuulf,  the  poem,  7,  28,  65, 
123-4,  r6S  note. 

Berengarius,  Count  of  Friuli,  after- 
wards King  of  Italy,  489. 

Berhtold,  468. 

Berhtulf,  King  of  Mercia,  305,  368. 

Bernard,  King  of  Italy,  214,  242. 

Bernard,  Count  of  Auvergne,  440-1, 

443- 
Bernard    I.,    Count    of    Gothia    or 

Septimania,  214,  242-3,  247,  267, 

281. 
Bernard  II.,  Count  of  Gothia,  441, 

443.  446. 
Berchta,  Bertha,   Perchta,  goddess, 

54,  65,  530  ;  see  also  Perchta. 
Bertha  '  Broadfoot,'  wife  of  Pippin 

the  Short,  530. 
Bertha,  daughter  of  Lothair  II.,  421. 
Bertha,  see  Berchta. 
Bertin,    St.,    Abbey   plundered    by 

Vikings,    450 ;    annals   of   Hinc- 

mar's  work  upon,  461  ;  Abbot  of, 

see  Adalbert. 
Biarmia  or  Bjarmaland  (Perm),  292. 
Billing,  elf  of  twilight,  79. 
Birca     (Bjorkd),      first      Christian 

church  in  Sweden  built  at,  231, 

272-3. 
Bjarmaland,  see  Biarmia. 
Bjorn,  King  of  Upsala,  231. 
Bjorn    '  Ironside,"    son    of    Ragnar 

Lodbrok,  319,  354,  358  j??. 
Bjorn  Butsecarl,  373. 


554 


INDEX. 


Black  forests,  34,  46. 

'  Black  pool,'  meaning  of  Dubh-linn, 

93- 
Black  water,  Vikings  on  the,  194-5. 
Blaithmac,  martyr,  slain  by  Vikings, 

J?5- 
Blois,  plundered  by  Vikings,  320. 

Blood,    admixture    of    Norse    and 

Danish,  in  England,  392. 
Blood-engle,  punishment  of  the,  163. 
Bobbio,     monastery     founded     by 

Columban,  112  ;  Wala,  Abbot  of, 

252. 
Bodo,  a  pervert  to  Judaism,  242. 
Bohemians,  300,  406. 
Boniface,   St.  (Winfred),    117  sqq., 

210,  507. 
Bonn,  plundered  by  Vikings,  452. 
'  Book-Latin,'  126. 
Bordeaux,  siege  of,  by  Vikings,  302. 
Boso,    Count,    afterwards   King    of 

Lower  Burgundy,  427,  433,  440, 

442  sqq.,  461,  484,  489. 
Bows,  see  Weapons  of  Vikings. 
Brandan,  St.,  108. 
Bregenz  (Brigantia),  3,  III. 
Bregia  (Bray),  189. 
Bremen,    bishopric,    210,    508,   see 

Rimbert. 
Bretons  and  Lewis  the  Stammerer, 

413  ;  see  also  Brittany. 
Bridges  protecting  Seine  at  Paris, 

472  sqq. 
Brisarthe,    death    of    Robert    the 

Strong  at,  355  sq. 
Britain,  myth  concerning,  4. 
Brittany,  240,  244,  248,  433,  &c.  j 

see  also  Erispo'i,  Nominoi. 
Brocken,  Witches'  Sabbath  on  the, 

68,  533- 
Broti,  the,  13. 
Biude-mac-Maelchon,        King      of 

North  Picts,  96,  102. 
Bruno,  Liudolfing,  Duke  of  Saxony, 

345,    424,    443,    449  ;    see    also 

Genealogical  Table. 
Brynhild,  61,  67,  76. 
Bulgars,  che,  244. 


Burford,  battle  of,  138. 

Burgred     or     Burhred,     King    of 

Mercia,  376  sqq.,  391. 
Burgundians,  the,  20,  24,  99,  122. 
Burgundy,  Lower,  kingdom  of,  445, 

484,  489  ;  see  also  Boso. 
Burgundy,  Upper,  kingdom  of,  484, 

486,  489 ;  see  also  Rudolf. 
Byrnie  or  Brunia,  170. 

Cadiz  attacked  by  Vikings,  283. 
Caithness,  Norse  settlement  in,  371, 

395- 

Caledonia,  6,  15. 

Camargue,  Corsairs  on,  283 ;  Vikings 
on,  362,  422. 

Cambrey,  221  ;  plundered  by 
Vikings,  450. 

Cambridge,  380 ;  Vikings  in,  397. 

Campus  mala;,  the,  235. 

Canche,  Vikings  in  the,  278-9. 

Candida  casa  or  Whithern,  abbey 
at,  90. 

Canterbury  stormed  by  Vikings,  305. 

Capetan  House,  490  ;  see  also 
Genealogical  Table. 

Capitnlare  Paderbrunnense,  135  and 
note,  530  note;  see  also  Saxon 
capitularies. 

Carinthia,  128,  214,  451  ;  see  also 
Arnolf,  Carloman. 

Carling  dynasty,  fall  of,  488. 

Carlingford  Lough,  battle  of,  337. 

Carloman,  son  of  Charles  Martel, 
216. 

Carloman,  Abbot  of  St.  Medard, 
son  of  Charles  the  Bald,  427  ;  see 
also  Genealogical  Table. 

Carloman,  Duke  of  Bavaria,  &c, 
son  of  Lewis  the  German,  408, 
412  note,  423,  428  sqq.,  43 1,  438, 
441,  443,  451 ;  see  also  Genea- 
logical Table. 

Cashel,  archbishopric  of,  201. 

Castra  Vetera,  II. 

Catholicism,  mediaeval,  84,  497  sqq. 

Cavalry,  310,  338. 

Cead walla,  King  of  Stratbclyde,  105. 


INDEX. 


555 


Ccarbhall,  King  of  Ossory,  203. 
CenruUh.  Irish  missionary,  96. 
Ceolwulf,    puppet-king   of   Mercia, 

391- 

Chalons  sur  Marne,  Lewis  the 
German  and  Charles  the  Bald  at, 
263. 

Chansons  de  geste,  215. 

Charlemagne,  124,  129,  1 49-50, 
152-3,  213,  216,  228,  242,  504, 
506,  511,  530-I. 

Charles,  King  of  Aquitaine,  son  of 
Charles  the  Bald,  413,  426;  see 
also  Genealogical  Table. 

Charles  the  Bald,  King  of  West 
Francia,  245,  247,  2co,  277,  303, 
309'  332>  388,  410  sqq.,  417, 
420,  425,  453;  see  also  Genea- 
logical Table. 

Charles  the  Fat,  King  of  Swabia, 
afterwards  emperor,  &c,  408  note, 
424,  428,  431,  442,  446,  453  sqq., 
463,  469  sqq.,  485,  48S  ;  vision 
of,  109;  see  also  Genealogical 
Table. 

Charles  Martellus,  121,  213,  514. 

Charles,  son  of  Pippin,  King  of 
Aquitaine,  423  ;  see  also  Genea- 
logical Table. 

Charles,  King  of  Provence,  son  of 
Lothair  I.,  363,  416,  421-2;  see 
a'so  Genealogical  Table. 

Charles  the  Simple,  son  of  Lewis 
the  Stammerer,  469  ;  see  also 
Genealogical  Table. 

Charta  divisionis  insperii,  the,  243. 

Chaitres,  Hasting  in,  359. 

Chatti,  the,  44. 

Cherusci,  the,  34. 

Childeric,  the  Frankish  king,  102. 

Chippenham,  Viking  camp  at, 
400-1. 

Chlodowig,  see  Clovis. 

'  Choosers  of  the  slain'  (Valkyriur), 
64. 

Christ,  86-7. 

Christianity,  32;  popular,  536.^/.; 
-ee  also  Catholicism,  mediaeval. 


Chronicle,  the  English,  126. 
Church,  the  Frankish,  506  sqq.  ;  in 

Saxony,  509 ;  Lotharingian,  520  ; 

Northumbrian,  103  sqq. ;  Western 

and  Eastern  separation  of,  51 1  sqq. 
Church  bells,  use  of,  226. 
Church  music,  226. 
Cimbric  chersonese,  the,  21. 
Cimmerians,  the,  21. 
Cirencester,  Vikings  in,  446. 
Cis-Albiani,  140. 
Civilis,  rebellion  of,  15. 
Claudian,  poet,  4. 
Clonmacnoise      or      Clonmicnoise, 

Vikings  in,  94,  197,  200. 
Clonmore  plundered,  197. 
Clontarf,  magic   banner   borne    at, 

399- 

Clovis,  87,  100,  102-3,  XII»  ll&- 

Cnut,  393. 

Cobbo,  Saxon  Count,  brother  of 
Liudolf,  298,  344,  424,  508  ;  see 
also  Genealogical  Table. 

Coblenz,  plundered  by  Vikings,  455. 

Coin  of  Halfdan  struck  in  London, 
390-1. 

Coldingham,  abbey,  106. 

Colmar,  plain  of,  250. 

Cologne,  12 ;  archbishopric,  435  ; 
plundered  by  Vikings,  452  ;  see 
also  Giinther,  Willibert. 

Colonsay,  Norse  remains  found  at, 
205  note. 

Columba,  St.,  91-2,  96,  99,  121. 

Columba,  St.,  94,  104,  1 11. 

Comgall,  St.,  93,  96. 

Commerce,  Irish,  due  to  the  Vi- 
kings, 205. 

Compiegne,  diet  at,  462. 

Conde.  Vikings  settled  at,  460-2. 

Connaught,  plundered  by  Vikings, 
199. 

Conrad,  son  of  Welf,  324,  343. 

Conrad,  son  of  Conrad  the  Welling, 

343- 

Conrad,  Count  of  Paris,  son  of  Ku- 
do, f.  Count,  343  note,  443. 

Constantine  the  Great,  85,  515. 


556 


INDEX. 


Constantine  or  Cyril,  missionary  to 
the  Slavs,  509. 

Constantinople,  Council  of,  504 
sqq. 

Conveisions  of  the  heathen,  112. 

Corbie,  abbey,  221,  228,  243  ;  see 
also  Wala. 

Cordova,  see  Abd-er- Rahman. 

Cork  harbour,  Vikings  in,  193,  195. 

Cormac,  Ir.sh  saint,  96,  206. 

Cornelimiinster,  survival  of  heathen- 
ism at,  241  note,  533. 

Cormshmen  (West  Welsh)  defeated 
at  Hengstone,  367. 

Corunna,  attacked  by  Vikings,  282. 

Corvey  (New  Corbie)  Abbey,  228, 
508  ;  see  also  An  scar. 

Creed  of  Heathen  Germany,  33  sqq.  ; 
of  Christendom  in  the  ninth  cen- 
tury, 497  sqq. 

Crisis  in  the  disintegration  of  the 
Western  Empire,  488. 

Croyland  abbey,  372,  380. 

Cuthbert,  St.,  144. 

Cuthred,  King  of  Wessex,  138. 

Cynwith,  battle  at,  399. 

Cyril,  see  Cons'.antine. 

Czechs,  see  Bohemians. 

Dal  Cms,  the,  199. 

Dalmatica,  the,  worn  by  Charles  the 
Bald,  429.' 

Danebrog,  the,  429. 

Danes,  the,  132  and  passim;  see 
also  Denmark. 

Danes  and  Norsemen,  battles  be- 
tween, 335  sqq. 

Danish  dyke,  the,  150. 

'  Daunites'  (Danes),  the,  335. 

Decretab,  False,  the,  515. 

Decumates  A  *ri,  515- 

Defence,  methods  of,  among  Ancient 
Germans,  13. 

Delling,  elf  of  dawn,  79. 

Demeter,  53. 

Denis,  St.,  Abbey  of,  290,  291  ; 
Abbot  of,  see  Gozlin,  Hildwin. 

Denmark,  21  ;  South,  kings  of,  132; 


kings  of,   their  nicknames,    163  ; 

civil  wars  in,  219-20,  314-5  sqq.  ; 

kings  of,  disappear  from  pages  of 

Chroniclers,  447. 
Derg,   Lough,   St.   Patrick's  purga- 
tory in,  108;  Viking  defeat  in,  199. 
Derry,  Columba's  monastery  at,  94, 

96  ;  capital  of  the  Northern  Hy- 

Njall,  189. 
Desiderius,  King  of  Lombardy,  130. 
Destruction   of    the  world,  foretold 

in  Muspilli,  540. 
Deutz,  134,  434. 
Diedenhofen,  see  Thionville. 
Disert  Tipraite,   plundered    by   Vi- 
kings, 194. 
Divisio  Imperii,  243,  245,  423. 
Divisonis,    Charta,    253 ;    see   also 

Dizu'sio  Imp,  ri>. 
Divo  Angusto,  altar  raised  at  Lyons, 

125. 
Dnieper,  trade-route  by,  23,  173. 
Dogma,  growth  of,  84. 
Donar,  50. 
Donatists,  the,  89. 
Dorset  coast,  Vikings  on,  141. 
Dorstad   (Wyk-te-Duurstede),    21 1, 

229  ;  plundered  by  Vikings,  253, 

271,  273,  302,  352. 
Dragon  ships,  28,  168. 
Dream  of  Ragnar's  son,  365. 
Dress,    Frankish,   429 ;    of   Viking 

leaders,  ibid. 
Drihthelmy  vision  of,  109. 
Drom-h-Ing  (Dromin),  plundered  by 

Vikings,  197. 
Drumhome,  monastery  at,  97. 
Drusus,  16,  17  ;  his  vision,  17- 
Dubh-Gaill,  192. 
Dublin  (Dubh-linn),  93,    198,  204, 

•1 1 *- 

Du  Chiillu,  Mr.,  31  note. 

Dudo,     historian    of    the    Norman 

dukes,  172. 
Diiirtech  or   dairtech,  92. 
Duisburg,    plundered     by    Vikings, 

463- 
D  ileek,  plundered  by  Vikings,  197. 


INDEX. 


557 


Ditmmler,  Dr.  R.,  his  Geschichte  des 
Ostfrankischen      Reiclis     quoted, 

485. 
Duna  or  Dwina,  trade-route  by,  23, 

173- 

Dunderrow,  plundered  by  Vikings, 

194. 
Durrow,    Columba's   monastery   at, 

96. 

Eadmund,  St.,  366,  382  sqq. 
Eadmund  Ironside,  see  Edmund. 
Eadweard,  the  Elder,  495. 
Eadwine,    King    of    Northumbria, 

104. 
Ealswyth,  388. 
East,  monasticism  in  the,  90. 
East  Anglia,  276,  377. 
Eastern  Church,  separation  of  from 

Western,  511  sqq. 
East  Frankland,  East  Franks,   128, 

239 ;   see  also   Franconia,   Lewis 

the  German,  &c. 
East  Gothland,  176. 
Eastphalians,  129. 
Ebbo,  Bishop  of  Rheims,  221,  251, 

273,  460,  507. 
Eberhard,  or  Everard,  Count,  465-6. 
Ebolus,  Abbot  of  St.  Germains,  444, 

474,  480,  487. 
Ecclesiastical  party  in  France,  the, 

348. 
Ecgberht,    King  of   Wessex,    202, 

250*  367.  369- 
Ecgberht,  puppet  king  of  Bernicia, 

375- 
Ecgfrith,  King  of  Northumbria,  140. 
Edda  (elder),  the,  534. 
Eddington,  see  ALthandune. 
Edhelingi,  the,  270. 
Edmund  Ironside,  393. 
Egino,  Count,  462. 
Eimardj    Christian  champion,  478. 
Elbe,  the,  18,  218 ;  raid  of  Vikings 

up,  309,  449. 
Eleusinia,  56. 
El-Hakim  II.,  Caliph  of  Cordova, 

283. 


Elias,  mythical  fight  of,  with  Anti- 
christ, 540. 
Elivagar,  Elivogs,  sea  of  the,  72,  79. 
Elm,  see  Ash. 
Elsloo,  see  Ashloh. 

Ely.  372, 381. 

Emir  Zado,  246. 

Emma,  wife  of  Lewis  the  German, 

324,  343,  423. 
Empire,  fiction  of  an,  301. 
Engelberga,   wife   of  the    Emperor 

Lewis  II.,  420-1,  427,  443. 
Engelschalk,    Count    in    the    East 

Mark,  462. 
Engeltrud,  daughter  of  Lewis   II., 

and  wife  of  Boso,  421,  443. 
Engern  (Angrarii),  the,  129,  131. 
England,  Viking  raids  on,  201-2, 276, 

&c  ;  Scandinavian  settlements  in 

north  of,  498. 
Englefield,  battle  of,  385. 
Eoganachts,  the,  191. 
Eotans,  74. 

Eresburg,  Saxon  fortress,  130-I. 
Erilang,  Count,  472. 
Erispoi,  Duke  of  Brittany,  280,  310, 

319,410,  412. 
Eriveus,    Christian   champion,    478 

note. 
Erland,    Christian    champion,    478 

note. 
Ermine- Saule,  43. 
Ermenfrid,  Christian  champion,  478 

note. 
Erminfrid,  Bishop  of  Beauvais,  334. 
Ermoldus  Nigellus,  223. 
Ernest,  Count  of  Bohemian  mark, 

347- 
Ervic,  Christian  champion,  478  note. 
Eugenius  II.,  Pope,  512. 
Everard,  see  Eberhard. 
Exeter,  Vikings  in,  398-9. 
Eyder,  129. 

Fall  of  Rome  before  Alaric,  89. 
False  decretals,  the,  515. 
Faroes,  the,  209,  492,  498. 
Fate,  179. 


55* 


INDEX. 


Feigr,  see  '  Fey. ' 

Feidhlimidh,  see  Felim. 

Fel  Christianitatis,  name   given  to 

Rorik,  303. 
Felim,  King  of  Munster,  201,  203. 
Feins,  ravaged  by  Vikings,  197* 
Feudalism,  534. 
'Fey,'  180. 

'  Field  of  Lies,'  the,  250. 
Fields,  the  Glittering,  or  fields  of  the 

immortals,  70. 
Fierebras,  215. 
Fiery  dragons,  141. 
Fimbul-tyr,  52. 
Finn-Arnesson,  181. 
Finn-Gaill,  193. 
Finns,  60. 
Flemings,  241. 

'  Flickering  flame  '  {vafrlogt),  78. 
Fontanelle,  Abbey  of,  plundered  by 

Vikings,  304. 
Fontenailles,  see  Fontenoy. 
Fontenoy,  battle  of,  265  sqq.,  422. 
Forannan,  Archbishop  of  Armagh, 

196,  199. 
<  Ford  of  the  hurdles  '  (Ath-Cliath), 

the,  93. 
Forests,  46. 

Forma  abrenuntiationis^  51  note. 
Fortifications,  339  ;  of  Paris,  353. 
Founders  of  monasteries  in  Alsace, 

Lorraine,  Bavaria,  &c,  112. 
Frsene,  Viking  leader,  386. 
Francia,   239  and  passim  ;  see  also 

East  Francia,  West  Francia. 
Franco,  Bishop  of  Liege,  436,  440. 
Franconia,  see  East    Francia,   &c, 

and  Henry. 
Frankish   dynasties,    121  ;    church, 

506;  decay    of,   513;  system    of 

land-tenure,  270. 
Franks,    20,  115,  122,  &c,  passim  ; 

dress  of,  429. 
Frankfurt,  council  of,  5°3»  511, 
Frey,  53-4,  7S,  81. 
Freyja,  54. 
Friesland,  see  Frisia. 
*«gg.  47.  54- 


Frilingi,  270. 

Frisia,    116;  raids  on,   123,  150-I, 

J53.  239,  253,  255,  301,  351. 
Frisians,   victory  of,  over   Vikings, 

464,  466. 
Friuli,  Count  of,  237,  489. 
Frode's  mill,  16S  note. 
Fulda,  Abbey  of,  134,  210,  527. 
Fulham  army  (Vikings)  the,  446. 
Foror    Normannomm,     143,     251, 

272. 
Furseus,  see  Fursey,  St. 
Fursey,  St.  lojsq.,  296. 
Fylking,  Hamal's,  66. 
Fylkja  Ziama/t,  66  note. 
Fyrd,     English,     contrasted     with 

Viking  troops,  398. 


Gabhar,  see  Lough  Gabhar. 

Gsesmera,  see  Geissmar. 

Gaill,  185. 

Galaxy,  69. 

Gall,  St., 94,  in  sqq.  ;  abbey,  monk 

of,  152,  211. 
Gall-Gaedhil,  201. 
Galloway,  Mr.  William,  205  note. 
Grove,  sacred,  40. 
Garcia,  King  of  Navarre,  361. 
Gardariki,  156,  173,  491. 
Garments  miraculously  marked  with 

a  cross,  141. 
Gascons,   241  ;    see    also     Navarre. 
Gauthiod,  176. 
Gauzbert,    missionary  in    Sweden, 

231,297. 
Geirrodh  (Geruth),  57,  59,  75. 
Geissmar,  41,  45,  119,  210. 
Genevieve,  St.,  102,  291. 
General  assembly  (placitum),  235. 
Genoveva,  see  Genevieve. 
Gensomir,  175. 
German  language,  preaching  in  the, 

536.. 
Germain,  St.,  miracles  wrought  by, 

291,  479. 
Germains    l'Auxerrois,    St.,   abbey, 

Vikings  in,  475. 


INDEX. 


559 


Germains    des    Pre"s,    St.,     abbey, 

Vikings  in,  478-9,  486. 
Germanicus,  16,  44. 
Germans,  ancient,  43. 
Germany,  Roman,    44;    first  great 

Viking  attack  on,  285  ;  Viking  in- 
vasion  of,   452  sqq.,    540-I. 
Geruth  (Geruthus),  see  Geirrodh. 
Ghent,  plundered  by  Vikings,  303, 

447  ;  Viking  defences  at,  449. 
Giants,  72  sqq. 
Giant  Loki,  the,  183. 
Gisla  or  Gisella,  daughter  of  Lothair 

II.,  422,  458,  465,  518. 
Gisla  or  Gisella,  daughter  of  Carlo- 
man  of  Bavaria,  424. 
Gisli  Siirson,  293  sq. 
'Givoldi    fossa,'   Viking    camp   at, 

303-4,307,311. 
Glamorganshire,    Vikings   in,    142, 

190. 
'  Glittering  fields,'  the,  70. 
Gloucestershire,  Vikings  in,  399-400. 
Gods'  bridge,  the,  69. 
Godfred,  King  of  South  Denmark, 

132,    150   sqq.t     176,    212,    219  ; 

sons  of,  220. 
Godfred,      son      of     Harald      the 

baptized,  222,  232,  303,  317. 
Godfred,  Viking  leader,   447    sqq., 

490. 
Godrod  (Godfred),  150. 
Gokstad,  Viking  ship  found  at,  156. 
Gondreville,  466. 
Gontran   (Guntchramnus),   King  of 

Burgundy,  216. 
Gorm  the  Old  or  the  Wise,  57  note, 

183,  491. 
Gothia,   240,    246,    267 ;     see  also 

Septimania. 
Gothic  architecture,  226. 
Goths,  the,  8,  20,  100,  159,  241. 
Gozbert,   Christian  champion,    478 

note. 
Gozlin,  Bishop  of  Paris,  440,  444, 

449-5°'  471  sqq.,  479  sq.,  486. 
Gozwin,    Christian   champion,    478 

note. 


Grantaceaster,  381. 

Great  army,  see  Army. 

Greater  Suithiod,  see  Gardarfki. 

Greenland,  208,  498. 

Gregory  I.,  Pope,  114,  227,  511. 

Gregory  IV.,  Pope,  239,  330. 

Grendel,  7,  8. 

Grim  Kamban,  492. 

Grimhild,  67. 

Gripir,  180. 

Grove,  sacred,    18,   26,  59  sq.,  68, 

130. 
Growth  of  dogma,  84. 
Guadalete,  127. 
Guillaume     Fierebras,     Count     of 

Orange,  215. 
Gunhard,  281. 
Guntchramnus,  see  Gontran. 
Gunther,  King,  175. 
Gunther,  Archbishop    of    Cologne, 

4435  5T9  sqq- 

Guthorm,  nephew  of  Horik  I.,  316 

sq. 
Guthorm     (Guthrum)      ^Ethelstan, 

Viking  leader,  379,  397,  401   sqq. 
Guthred,    Danish    king    in  North- 

umbria,  404,  495. 


Hadrian  I.,  Pope,  130,  139,  504, 

5o5>  5"- 
Hadrian  II.,  Pope,  416,  522. 
Hasmgils,  10S. 

Hrerethaland,  141-2  note,  185. 
Hafirsfjord,  battle  of,  492-3. 
Hajib  Isa-ibn-Hassan,  360. 
Hakim,  El-II.,  Caliph  of  Cordova, 

283. 
Halron,  Earl,  164. 
Halberstadt,  210,  508. 
Halfdan,   Viking    leader,     son     of 

Ragnar  Lodbrok,  326,  370,  379, 

3S6,  387,  390-1,  396,  404,  445- 
Halitgar,  Bishop  of  Cambray,  221. 
Hamal,  66  ;  his  fylking,  ibid.,  401. 
Hamburg,  town  and  archbishopric, 

210.     21S,    273,    29S    sq.,    508; 

plundered  by  Vikings,  285-6. 


560 


INDEX. 


Hamond  (  =  Amund),  Viking  leader, 

379- 
Harald  pretender  to  throne  in  Den- 
mark,      afterwards      vassal       of 
Empire,  220-1  sqq.,  229,  231,  235, 

27L303.  386,  447- 
Harald,  nephew  of  Horik   I.,  and 

pretender  to  Danish  throne,  316 

sq. 
Harald    Haarfagr,   164-5  note,  491 

sq. 
Hartlepool,  monastery  at,  106. 
Harz,  the,  1 1 ,  30,  34. 
Hase,  battle  on  the,  136. 
Hasting,   Viking  leader,  342,  355, 

358  sqq.,  364,  422,  447. 
Hathemi,  508  note. 
Hathumod,  St.,  508  note. 
'  Haunted  '  life  of  the  Vikings,  293. 
Heahmund,  Bishop  of  Sherbourne, 

388. 
'  Heathen,'  7. 

Heathendom  and  Christendom,  con- 
test between,  10,  &c,  499. 
Heathenism,  relics  of  German,  529 

sqq. 
Heathfield,  battle  of,  104. 
Hebrides,  Norse  settlements  in  the, 

2°5.  371,  396. 
Heddington,  see  ^Ethandune. 
Heimdal,    progenitor  of  mankind, 

27,  29. 
Helgi,  80. 

Helheim  (helheimar),  73,  76. 
Heliand,  the  (poem),  87,  137,  508, 

529,  535  W- 
Helm-Gunnar,  63. 
Hemming,  Danish  king,  152,  219. 
Hengston,  battle  of,  202,  304,  367. 
Henry,   Duke    of    Franconia,    346, 

443.  455  *?•»  463  *q->  478,  481 ,  489- 

Herbauge,  275,  302  ;  see  also  Rain- 
aid. 

Hercynian  forest,  the,  34,  528. 

Hereberht,  Count,  249. 

Hereberht,  ealdorman,  276. 

Her  ford,  abbey,  508. 

Herigar,  a  Christian  Swede,  297. 


Herio,  see  Noirmoutiers. 

Heristallum,  135. 

Herivseus,  Count,  472. 

Hermodhr,  75. 

Hersfeld  (Hertzfeld)  Abbey,  508. 

Hervor,  80. 

Hesse,  118. 

Hessians,  45. 

Hewalds,  the,  English  missionaries, 

125. 
Hexham,  106. 
Hieronymus,  Count,  436. 
Highley  ?  see  Iglea. 
Hilary  of  Poictiers,  St.,  90. 
Hildesheim,  76,  508. 
HilJr,  67. 
Hildwin,  Abbot  of  St.  Medard  and 

of  St.  Denis,  427,  461. 
Hincmar,    Archbishop   of    Rheims, 

324.  334.  3^9,  4io,  417.  432,  440, 

444,  460,  507,  519-20. 
Hlodhyn,  50. 

Holgar  or  Otkar,  the  paladin,  182. 
Holmgang,  the,  39. 
Holm  Peel,  146. 
Holy  Isle,  106,  142  ;  see  also  Lindis- 

farne. 
Holy  See,   113,    118,  510;  see  also 

Popes. 
Hordaland,  176,  185. 
Horik  I.,   Danish    king,  222,   274, 

289,  292,  297,  298,  302,  316. 
Horik  II.,  Danish  king,  317  sq. 
Horm,  Viking  leader,  ^7. 
1  House  of  Death,'  the,  78. 
Howth,     plundered     by     Vikings, 

193- 
Hrsesvelg,  a  giant  in  Edda,  7,  75. 
Hrimthursar,  the,  74. 
Hrolf,  see  Rolf. 
Huesca,  246. 
Hugh,  see  Hugo. 
Hugleik    (Hygelac),    122   sq.,  140, 

174. 
Hugo    the  Timid,  father-indaw  of 

Lothair  I.,  246  note. 
Hugo,   Abbot  of  St.   Quintin,  &c, 

uncle  of  Charles  the  Bald,  281. 


INDEX. 


561 


Hugo,  the  Welf,  Abbot  of  Tours 
(Marmoutier),  324,  343  sq. ,  356, 
442  sqq.,  459,  463,  470  sq.,  479, 
486,  514  ;  see  also  Genealogical 
Table. 

Hugo  of  Lorraine,  natural  son  of 
Lothair  II.,  409,  422-3,  446, 
458>  459,  465  sq.s  5*8;  see  also 
Genealogical  Table. 

Hugo  Capet,  347  ;  see  also  Genea- 
logical Table. 

Hukbert,  Abbot  of  St.  Maurice,  347, 
5H,  5i8. 

Human  pair,  creation  of  the  first, 
27. 

Humour  of  the  Scandinavian  people, 
163. 

Huntingdon,  abbey  at,  372;  plun- 
dered by  Vikings,  380. 

Huns,  8,  74,  101  ;  see  also  Magyars. 

Hvergelmir,  79. 

Hy,  94  sq.  ;  see  also  Iona. 

Hygelac,  see  Hugleik. 

Hy-Njall  or  O'Neil,  the,  188. 

Hyperboreans,  land  of  the,  70. 

Iceland,  208  sq.,  288,  492,  498. 
Iconoclasm,  see  Image-worship. 
I  erne,  10,  15  ;  see  also  Ireland. 
Iglea,  401  and  nole. 
Iley  ?  see  Iglea. 
Image-worship,  503  sq. 
Imagination,    necessary   use  of,    in 

interpreting  mythology,  47. 
Immo,  Bishop  of  Noyon,  334. 
Immortals,  field  of  the,  70. 
Imperial  coronation,  149. 
Ingelheim,  222  sq. 
Ingulf    of   Croyland,    the    pseudo-, 

378. 
Ingvar,  see  Ivar. 
Inishannon,  194. 
Inistioge,     plundered    by   Vikings, 

*?4- 
Innishmurray,  plundered  by  Vikings, 

190. 
Innispatrick,  plundered  by  Vikings, 

146. 


Interment,  a  Viking,  205-6. 

Iona,   94,   114,    146,    190,   194;  see 

also  Hy. 
Ireland,    monasticism   in,   91    sqq.  ; 

Viking  raids  in,  145  sq.,  185  sqq.  ; 

Viking  settlements  in,  370-1,  498. 
Irish  art  work,  98. 
Irish  Church,  208  sq. 
Irish  monks,  112  sqq. 
Irmingard,  wife  of  Lewis  the  Pious, 

244  sq.,  421 . 
Irminsul,  43  sq.,  68,  130. 
Irmintrud,  wife  of  Charles  the  Bald, 

425.  4;>2- 

Isa-ibn- Hassan,  360. 

Isidore  of  Seville,  514;  see  also 
Pseudo-Isidore. 

Tsis,  54  sqq. 

Isle  of  Wight,  115. 

Italy,  255,  414. 

Ith,  battle  at,  202. 

Ivar,  son  of  Ragnar  Lodbrok,  Vi- 
king leader,  326,  370,  373,  382, 
398,  494  sq. 

Jargna,  Viking  leader,  336. 
Jarrow,  monastery  of,  106,  143. 
Jerome,  89. 
Jewel,  Alfred's,  found  near  iEthel- 

ney,  401. 
Jews,  241,  302. 
Jocelin,  see  Gozlin. 
John  the  Archchanter,  227. 
John  Scotus,  525  note. 
John  VIII.,  Pope,  420,  427  sq.,  432, 

439  sq.,  443. 
Jomsburg  Vikings,  164. 
Jordanes,  8,  26. 
Jotunheim,  72  sq.,  76  sqq.,  184. 
Judith  the  Empress,  wife  of  Lewis 

the  Pious,   223,   245,    247,  251, 

255.  260,  343,  421. 
Judith,  daughter  of  Charles  the  Bald, 

327,  353,  368,  412-3,  426. 
Julich,  plundered  by  Vikings,  452. 
Jumieges,    threatened    by    Vikings, 

278. 
Jupiter,  50. 


37 


562 


INDEX. 


Jupiter's  oak,  41. 
Jutland,  22. 

Kalbi,  Viking  leader,  352. 
Kells,  monastery  at,  97,  147. 
Kent,  Viking  raids  in,  276,  370. 
Ketil  Flatnose,  493. 
Khan  of  the  Bulgars,  the,  244. 
Kieran,  St.,    founder   of    Clonmac- 

noise,  94,  204. 
Killarney,  Viking  raid  in,  191. 
Kilpeaeon,    plundered    by  Vikings, 

..I94- 
Kinsale  harbour,  Vikings  in,  104. 

Lambert    (Lantbert),    Count,    the 

Elder,  248. 
Lambert     (Lantbert),     Count,     the 

Younger,  261,  280. 
Lambey  (Rechru),  94  ;  plundered  by 

Vikings,  145,  367. 
Land,  possession  of,  in  Middle  Ages, 

166. 
Landlord,  the,  167. 
Land-tenure,  270. 
Laon,  threatened  by  Vikings,  460. 
Latin,  '  Book,'  126. 
Latin  prose,  224. 
Latin     races,     separation    of,   from 

German,  489. 
Lazzi,  270. 

Lea,  the,  limit  of  Gulthorm's  king- 
dom, 403. 
Lecale,  Vikings  defeated  at,  194. 
Leek,  the,  21 1. 
Lcighlin  bridge,  attacked  by  Vikings, 

194. 
Leire  (Lethra),  kingdom  of,  176. 
Le    Mans,    plundered    by   Vikings, 

355- 
Leo  the  Isaurian,  Byzantine  emperor, 

SOS- 
Leo  III.,  Pope,  149,  238. 
Leo  IV. ,  Pope,  327. 
Lerida,  246. 
Lcth-cuinn  or  Con's  hal  f  (of  Ireland ), 

199  sqq. 


Lewis  the  Pious,  emperor,  135,  212, 
215  sqq.,  507-9,  511-12;  sons  of, 
421  ;  see  also  Genealogical 
Table. 

Lewis  the  German,  son  of  Lewis  the 
Pious,  239,  243,  249-50,  332  sqq., 
406,  418,  421,  423,  430,  529,  &c. ; 
see  also  Genealogical  Table. 

Lewis  II.,  emperor,  son  of  Lothair 
L,  330-1,  414,  416,  421,  512;  see 
also  Genealogical  Table. 

Lewis  the  Saxon,  son  of  Lewis  the 
German,  319,  408,  424,  431.  433, 
454 ;  see  also  Genealogical 
Table. 

Lewis  the  Stammerer,  34a,  411  sqq., 
442  sqq.  ;  see  also  GENEALOGICAL 
Table. 

Lewis,  son  of  Lewis  the  Stammerer, 
412  note,  443,  451  ;  see  also 
Genealogical  Table. 

Libera  nos  a  furore  Normantiorum, 
a  litany  used  in  Fran  e,  329. 

Liege,  meeting  at,  313  ;  Bishop  of, 
see  Franco. 

Limerick,  Viking  attacks  on,  198  ; 
settlement  in,  204. 

Lincolnshire,  395,  404  ;  large  admix- 
ture  of    Scandinavian   blood    in, 

.395.  404- 

Lindisfarne,  106  ;  Vik'ng  attacks  on, 
142-3,  190,  367. 

Lindsey,  Vikings  in,  276,  377. 

Lind-worm,  the,  288. 

Lisbon,  Viking  attack  on,  282. 

Lismore,  plundered  by  Vikings,  194. 

Liudolf  and  the  Liudolfings,  345, 
424,  449,  508  ;  see  also  Genea- 
logical Table. 

Liutgard,  wife  ot  Lewis  the  Saxon, 

345- 
Lochlann,  185. 
Loch-Leinn,  191. 
Loch,  see  also  Lough. 
Lodbrok,  see  Ragnar  Lodbrok. 
Lombards,  20,  24,  455. 
London,  plundered  by  Vikings,  278, 

304-5,  368,  390-1. 


INDEX. 


563 


1  Long  worm,'  the,  159. 

Loire,  Viking  raids  upon,  305,  320, 

430,  442. 
Lothair  I.,  son  of  Lewis  the  Pious, 

223,  243,  250  sqq.,  259  sqq.,  303, 

309i  314.  332-3>  421,  440,  453> 
512  sqq.  ;  see  also  Genealogical 
Table. 

Lothair  II.,  son  of  Lothair  I.,  332, 
333~4>  352>  4o6  sq.,  409,  416, 
421,440,518^/^.;  see  also  Genea- 
logical Table. 

Lothair,  son  of  Charles  the  Bald, 
Abbot  of  St.  Germains  l'Auxer- 
rois,  426 ;  see  also  Genealogical 
Table. 

Lough  Derg,  Viking  defeat  on,  199. 

Lough  Gabhar,  203. 

Lough  Neagh,  Viking  victory  on, 
196. 

Lough  Owel,  Turgesius  drowned  in, 
203. 

Louth,  plundered  by  Vikings,  197. 

Louvain,  Vikings  in,  464,  469  sq. 

Ltidivigslied,  the,  so-called,  451,459. 

Lugenfeld,  see  '  Field  of  Lies.' 

Luna,  siege  of,  by  Vikings,  363  sq. 

Luneburg  Heath,  battle  of,  449. 

Lyons,  2,  125,  242  sq.  ;  Archbishop 
of,  see  Agwbard. 

M  \as,  the,  277. 

MacNiel,  Mr.  Malcolm,  205  note. 

Magyars,  74,  407,  498. 

Mainz,  II,  12,  222,  515  note. 

Malachy  I. (Mais  chlainn),  203,  335. 

Malaga  attacked  by  Vikings,  361. 

Malar,  Lake,  237. 

Man,  Isle  of,  Viking  attack  on,  190; 

settlement  in,  498. 
Mangi  »nels,  use  in  defensive  warfare, 

474- 
Mannheim,  72,  76. 
Mantaille,  council  at,  445. 
Mantlets  or  niusadi,  used  in  sieges, 

474- 
Mark,  the,  37. 
Marmoutier  Abbey,  313,  344,  346; 


see  also  Alcuin,  Hugo,  Martin,  St., 

Tours. 
Maroboduus,  102,  132. 
Mars,  51. 

Maserfeld  (Oswestry?),  105. 
Marsh  country,  the,  276. 
Martin  of  Tours,  St.,  90  ;  see  also 

Marmoutier,  Tours. 
Matfrid,    Count,    of    Orleans,    246 

note,  252,  261,  440,  513. 
Maurice,  St.,  abbey  of,  see  Hukbert. 
Maypole,  the,  41. 
Meath,  189,  197,  199. 
Meaux,  plundered  by  Vikings,  487. 
Medard,  St., abbots  of,  see  Carloman, 

Hildwin. 
Medhampstead,  see  Peterborough. 
Medina  Sidonia,  attacked  by  Vikings, 

283. 
Meersen,   meeting   at,    302 ;  treaty 

of,  418,  431. 
Mei6r,  43. 
Melrose  abbey,  106. 
Menglod,  78. 
Mercia,  138;  Vikings  in,  375,  390-1 ; 

kings  of,  see  /Ethelbald,  Berhtulf, 

Burgred,  Offa,  Penda. 
Merseburg  incantations,  the,  528  sq. 
Merton,  battle  of,  388. 
Methodius,  missionary  to  the  Slavs, 

509- 
Metz,    council   at,   481  ;   synod  at, 

520  sq. 
Mimir,  59,  69,  167. 
Miracles,  291,  479. 
Missi  dominici  or  missi  regii,  237 

and  note. 
Mjolnir,  50. 

Moimir,  Duke  of  Moravia,  406. 
Molaise,  St.  (Kilmolash),  plundered 

by  Vikings,  194. 
1  Monarchia,'  the,  243. 
Monasteries,  106  sqq. 
Monasticism,  84,  88  sqq. 
Monkwearmouth,  106,  144. 
Monte  Cassino,  114  ;  Lothair's  false 

oath  at,  416,  522  sq. 
Montmartre,  481. 


564 


INDEX. 


Moravia  and   Moravians    (Maravi), 

300,  406  sq.,  423,  510  ;   dukes  of, 

see  Moimir,  Rastislas,  Suatopluk. 
Morcar,  378. 

Morocco,  attacked  by  Vikings,  361. 
Morwan,    Duke    of    Brittany,   244 

note. 
Mosel,  Vikings  on  the,  454. 
Mother    Earth   (Nerthus),    19,    29, 

54  ;  see  also  Nerthus. 
Mount  Garret,  plundered  by  Vikings, 

197. 
Mount  Osning,  battle  of,  136. 
Mull,  95. 
Mullins,  St.,  plundered  by  Vikings, 

194. 
Munster,  kingdom  of,  189  ;  see  also 

Felim. 
Munster,  bishopric,  210,  508. 
Murcomannus     or     Murman,     see 

Morwan. 
Musculi  or  mantlets,  473  sq. 
Muspell,  suggested  etymology  of  the 

word,  539  note. 
Muspilli,  the  poem  so-called,  529, 

539  sqq. 
Mysteries,  northern,  55  sqq. 

Nantes,  plundered  by  Vikings,  281. 
Navarre,  361. 
Neagh,  see  Lough  Neagh. 
Nekor,  attacked  by  Vikings,  361. 
Nerthus,  the  goddess,  19,  29,  47,  53 
sqq.,    65,  68,    IOI   sq.,    2l8,    530, 

533- 

Nervii,  the,  14  and  note. 

Neuss,  plundered  by  Vikings,  452. 

Neustria,  254. 

New  Ross,  plundered  by  Vikings, 
194. 

Nicoea  or  Constantinople,  council  of, 
504  sq. 

Nicholas  I.,  Pope,  348,  353,  410, 
416,  419,  509,  513,  517 -W- 

Nicknames,  use  of,  by  the  Scandina- 
vians, 163. 

Nibelungen  1  gend,  the,  167. 

Niel,  206  ;  see  also  Njall. 


Niflhel,  82. 

Nine,  recurrence  of  the  number,  in 

Eddaic  mythology,  59. 
Njall,  the  name,  206  ;  see  also  Hy- 

Njall. 
Njall,  of  the  nine  hostages,  189. 
Njall  Caille,  189,  201,  202. 
Njordh,  47,  54,  65. 
Noirmoutiers  (Herio),  275  sq.,  280 

sq.,  302,  308. 
Nomino'i    or    Nomenoe,     Duke    of 

Brittany,  280,  310,  410. 
Norden,  defeat  of  Vikings  at,  464. 
Normandy,  settlement  of,  491,  497. 
'  Normanni,'    135,    143,    185,  251  ; 

see  also  Northmen. 
Normans,  172. 
Noras,  the,  168. 

Norse  kingdoms  in  Ireland,  204. 
Norsemen,  192,  209,  &c. 
North  Albiani,  134. 
North  America,  209. 
Northmen,  passim  ;  ferocity  of,  457. 
Northumbria,  103^^.,  142  sq.,  190, 

372  sq.,  391.    ^ 
Nottingham,  Vikings  in,  375  sqq. 
Novgorod,  156,  491. 
Noyon,  Bishop  of,  334. 
Nydams  moos,  ship  found  in,  156. 
Nymuegen,    249,    253,    274 ;   plun 

dered  by  Vikings,  449. 

Obotriti,  see  Abodriti. 

Ockley,  defeat  of  Vikings  at,  306, 
,  368  sq. 

Odainsakr,  the,  71,  79. 

Odda,  ealdorman,  399. 

Odin,  11, 18,  54,  74  ;  see  also  Wodin. 

Odo,  Count  of  Orleans,  261. 

Odo,  son  of  Robert  the  .Strong, 
Count  of  Paris,  afterwards  King 
of  France,  356,  443,  472,  474, 
479  sq-i  486  sq.,  490;  see  also 
Genealogical  Table. 

Odoacer,  Christian  champion,  479 
note. 

Offa,  King  of  Mercia,  139,  201. 

Oger,  see  Otkar. 


INDEX. 


56: 


Oissel,  Viking  station,  307  ;  siege 
of    Vikings    in,     321     sqq.,    333, 

351- 

Olaf,  'tree-feller,'  35. 

Olaf,  the  saint,  1S1. 

Olaf  '  the  White,'  King  of  the  North- 
men in  Ireland,  328,  493  sqq. 

Old  Francia,  239. 

Old  Norse  literature,  187. 

Omer,  St.,  abbey,  plundered  by 
Vikings,  446. 

O'Neil,  188-9,  203  ;  see  alsoHy-N jail. 

Orbe,  treaty  of,  332. 

Ordono  I.,  King  of  Asturias,  360. 

Orkneys,  the,  Irish  monks  in,  96  ; 
Scandinavian  settlements  in,  209, 

371,  395'  492,  494- 
Orleans,  261  ;  plundered  by  Vikings, 

319;  Counts  of,  see  Matfrid,  Odo. 
Osberht,  King  of  Northumbria,  374. 
Oscar  (Asgeirr),  Viking  leader,  228, 

277  sqq.,  302  sqq. 
Osgod,  ealdorman,  378. 
Oskytel  or  Osketil,  Viking  leader, 

379,  397- 

Osnahurg,  508. 

Ossory,  men  of,  attack  Vikings,  194. 

Ostergau  (Frisia),  plundered  by  Vi- 
kings, 302. 

Ostmark,  the,  128,  407. 

Ostrogoths,  the,  100. 

Oswald,  St.,  King  of  Northumbria, 
105. 

Oswestry,  105. 

Oswia,  King  of  Northumbria,  105. 

Ota,  a  seeress  (?),  wife  of  Turgesius, 
61,  63,  200. 

Otkar  (Oger),  182. 

Otting,  441,451- 

Otto,  Count,  in  West  Francia,  322. 

Otto,  Duke  of  Saxony,  S"n  of  Liu- 
dolf  and  father  of  Henry  the 
Fowler,  345  sq.,  424,  443,  449. 

Otto  I.  (the  Great),  emperor,  511. 

Ouen,  St.,  abbey,  plundered  by 
Vikings,  278. 

Ouse,  the,  limit  of  Guthorm's  king- 
dom, 403. 


Outlaw's  tree,  the,  42. 
Ovvayne,  Sir,  108. 


Paderborn,  132,  210,  508. 

Palgrave,  Sir  F.,  quoted,  290. 

Pannonia,  244. 

Papal  policy,  242 ;  see  also  Holy 
See,  Popes. 

Papal  See,  see  Holy  See. 

Papas  (Irish  monks  or  hermits),  209, 
492. 

Paris,  184,  248  ;  Viking  attacks  on, 
285,  290  sqq.,  320  ;  fortifications 
of,  340 ;  third  and  fourth  raids 
upon,  351  ;  great  siege  of,  by 
Vikings,  471  sqq.,  483,  485,  490. 

Parret,  Vikings  defeated  on,  305. 

Paschal  I.,  Pope,  512. 

Paschasius  Radbertus,  see  Radbert. 

Patrick,  St.,  90,  99,  337. 

Pauli,  Dr.  R.,  quoted,  392. 

Paulinus,  apostle  of  Northumbria, 
104,  114,  227. 

Pavia,  428,  440. 

Peasants,  condition  of,  341. 

Pedro,  Don,  defeats  Vikings,  360. 

Penda,  King  of  Mercia,  104  sq.,  117. 

Penka,  Dr.  Carl,  31  note. 

Perchta  (Bertha,  &c),  54,  65,  530. 

Peter  and  Paul,  Sts.,  monasteries  of, 
at  Jarrow  and  Wearmouth,  144. 

Peterborough,  372 ;  plundered  by 
Vikings,  380. 

Pfalz-insel,  the,  257. 

Phantom  army,  246,  533. 

Phol,  52,  528  ;  see  also  Balder. 

Piacenza,   death  of  Lothair  II.  at, 

.416.  523- 

Picts,  95,  99  ;  their  country  plun- 
dered by  Vikings,  396  ;  accession 
of  Scottish  king  to  throne  of, 
494. 

Pitres,  council  at,  339  and  note,  341  ; 
fortifications  of,  339. 

Pippin  of  Landen,  216. 

Pippin  of  Herista1.  i\  \. 

Pippin  the  Short,  124.  21  5.  214-5. 


566 


INDEX. 


Pippin,  King  of  Italy,  son  of  Charle- 
magne, 135,  214,  242. 

Pippin,  King  of  Aquitaine,  son  of 
Lewis  the  Pious,  243  sq.,  248, 
254,  421  sq. ;  see  also  Genealo- 
gical Table. 

Pippin,  pretender  of  Aquitaine,  son 
of  Pippin  (the  above),  254,  259, 
281,  317,  354,  422;  see  also 
Genealogical  Table. 

Placitum,  the,  235. 

Plutei,  implements  used  in  siege 
operations,  476. 

Poictou,  354. 

Pontifex  maximus,  the  title  used  by 
the  popes,  125  note. 

Pope  and  emperor,  rival  claims  of, 
502,  510^. 

Popes;  see  Eugenius,  Gregory, 
Hadrian,  John,  Leo,  Nicholas, 
Paschal,  Sergius,  Silvester,  Ste- 
phen, Valentine. 

Portugal,  Viking  descent  upon,  283. 

Practical  jokes,  163. 

Pribina,  Duke  of  Pannonia,  509. 

Primsigning,  295. 

Procopius,  5,  70. 

Provence,  Provencals,  241,  255 ; 
kings  of,  see  Boso,  Charles. 

Priim,  abbey  of,  251,  453. 

Pseudo-Isidore,  the,  515  sqq. 

Purgatory,  109. 

Quiersy,  synod  of,   324 ;   council 

at,  439. 
Quentovic,  plundered   by   Vikings, 

278,  304.  36#- 

Raban,  Archbishop  of  Mainz,  313, 

507,  536. 
Radbert,  524  note,  525  note. 
Ra.lbod,  King  of  Frisia,  118,  124. 
Ragnar  Lodbrok,  174,  183  sq.,  286 

sqq.,  299,  326,  366,  374,  479. 
Ragnar  Lodbrok,  sons  of,  288,  358 

sq.,   364-5,   370  ;  see  also  Bjorn, 

Halfdan,  Ivar,  Ubbe. 


Ragnarok,  52. 

Rainbow,  the  gods'  bridge,  69. 

Ragnhild,  67. 

Rainald,  Count  of  Herbauge,  275, 

280. 
Ramiro  I.,  King  of  Asturias,  282, 

360. 
Ramnulf,  Count,  347,  354  sqq.,  422. 
Raphoe,  monastery  at,  96. 
Rastics,  see  Rastislas. 
Rastislas,   Duke    of  Moravia,    323, 

332,  406-7,  4-3. 
Ravenna,  council  of,  440. 
Reading,  Viking  camp  at,  384  sq. 
Rechrea,  Rechrain,  or  Rechru,  94, 

145- 

Reginald,  Count  of  Maine,  470. 

Reginar,  Count,  436. 

Reginar,  Count,  defender  of  Paris, 

472,  474. 
Reginfred,  Dane,  brother  of  Harald 

the  Baptized,  220  sq. 
Relics,  &c,  reverence  for,  5056. 
Rennes,  battle  near,  311,  410. 
Repton,  Vikings  in,  391. 
Rhadwald,  papal  legate,  520. 
Rheims,   221  ;    Viking  raids  upon, 

460,  487;  false  decretals  manu- 
factured at  (?),  515  ;  archbishops 

of,  see  Ebbo,  Hincmar. 
Ribemont,  peace  of,  448. 
Richildis,  second  wife  of  Charles  the 

Bald,  427,  432,  436. 
Rimbert,  Archbishop    of  Bremen, 

464,  507. 
Rime-giants,  74. 
Ring,  father  of  Ragnar    Lodbrok, 

287. 
Ring  -  breaker,    i.e.,     dispenser    of 

treasure,  167. 
Roads,  Roman,  I. 
Robert  the  Strong,   342,  344,  346, 

349,    354    sqq.,    439,    514;     see 

also  Genealogical  Table. 
Robert,  Count,   son  of  Robert  the 

Strong,  356,  443,  474;   see  a,so 

Genealogical  Table. 
Robert,  a  knight,  472. 


GENEALOGICAL  '1ABLES. 


567 


Rochester,  plundered    by   Vikings, 

278,  304,  368,  463. 
Roderic,   King  of  the  Visigoths  of 

Spain,  127,  375. 
Roderick  Mawr,  Prince  of  Wales, 

399- 
Rognvald,  Earl  of  Maeri,  494. 
Roland,  133. 
Rolf  (Rollo),  287,  359  sq.,  447,  49°, 

497- 
Rome  89,  237,  428,  501,   502;  see 

also  Popes,  &c. 
Roman  Germany,  10. 
Roman  implements  of  war,  473* 
Roman  roads,  see  Roads. 
Roman  wall,  6. 
Romariki,  272. 
Romberg,  272. 
Roncesvalles,  3,  133. 
Rorik,    nephew     (or    brother)     of 

Harald    the   baptized,    232,    303 

sqq.,  317  so:,  368. 
Rothad,  Bishop  of  Soissons,  517* 
Rouen,  plundered  by  Vikings,  289, 

470. 
Routes  of  Viking  expeditions,  191. 
Royal  saints,  216. 
Rudolf,  the  son  of  Welf  of  Altdorf, 

343 ;    see  also  Chronological 

Table. 
Rudolf,  grandson  of  Welf,  afterward 

King  of  Upper  Burgundy,   343, 

485,  489  ;  see  also  Chronologi- 
cal Table. 
Runes,  59. 
Rustringia,  231,  271. 


Sabbath,  witches',  68,  533. 
Sacramental  doctrine,  84,  524  sqq. 
Sacred   grove,   18,  26,  59   sq.,  69, 

130. 
St.  Bertin,  see  Bertin,  St. 
St.  Maurice,  Abbots  of,  see  Hukbert, 

Rudolf. 
Salerno,  Duke  of,  414. 
Salomon,    Duke   of   Brittany,    354, 

411,  430. 


1  Sancti  Eadmundi,'   inscription  on 
^  coins,  383. 

Saracens,  414,  419,  432,  490. 
Saumiers,  synod  of,  349. 
Saucourt,  battle  of,  450,  460. 
Saxnote,  57  note. 
Saxo  Grammaticus,  183. 
'  Saxon  Capitularies,'  530. 
Saxons,  20,   100,   115,   140;  defeat 

of,  by  Vikings,  449. 
Saxony,  239,  270-1  ;  Viking  attacks 

on,  309,  449,  466  ;  church  in,  508. 
Saxulf,  Viking  leader,  198  sq. 
'  Scaldingi,'  352  note. 
Scandinavia,  Scandinavians,  21  sqq.., 

28,  46,  219,  229,  &c. 
Scanzia,  Scandia,  or  Scania,  22  ;  see 

also  Scandinavia. 
Sceaf  or  Skef,  27,  29,  53,  57,  65. 
Scheld,  Vikings  on,  352,  446,  460  ; 

see  also  Antwerp,  Ghent,  &c. 
Scholarship  of  Irish  monks,  97. 
Scotus,Johannes,(Erigena),  525  note. 
Scotland,  Scandinavian  settlements 

in,  494,  498. 
Scottish  isles,   Scandinavian  settle- 
ments in,  498. 
Scottish  king,  accession  of,  to  throne 

of  Picts,  494. 
Sea-king,  life  of,  307. 
Seckington,  battle  of,  138. 
Seine,  Vikings  on  the,   277,    305, 

350,  431  sqq.,  439,  470  sqq. 
Seligenstad,  abbey,  508. 
Selwood,  401. 
Semmones,  18,  26,  59. 
Septimania  (or  Gothia),  240,  41 1. 
Sergius  II.,  Pope,  330,  512. 
Settlement  of  Angles  and  Saxons  in 

Britain,  100 
Seville,  attacked  by  Vikings,  283, 

360. 
Shannon,  Vikings  on,  195. 
Sheppey,  attacked  by  Vikings,  202  ; 

Viking  settlement  in,   326,  367, 

37o. 
Shetlands,  209,  395,  492. 
Shields,  see  Weapons  ol  Vikings. 


568 


INDEX. 


Ship,  Viking,  156. 

Siegfred  (Sifrit)  of  the  Nibelungen 

legend,  175,  180. 
Siegfred,  a  Danish  king,  132,  150. 
Siegfred,  pretender  to  the  Danish 

throne,  219,  286. 
Siegfred,  a  Viking  leader,  447,  452, 

456,  460,  470,  473  sqq.,  479,  484, 

487,  490. 
Sigambri,  the,  20. 
Sigesburg,  131. 
Sigrdrifa,  61-2  sqq.,  8l. 
Sigrced,  see  Sigurd. 
Sigriin,  61,  67,  80. 
Sigtuna,  176,  230,  297. 
Sigurd  (Sigroed),  61,  j6,  80,  180. 
Sigurd  Buisson,  164. 
Sihtric  (Sidrok),  Viking  leader,  319, 

386. 
Silvester,  Pope,  515. 
Sinthgunt  (Singunda),  528. 
Sinzig,  435. 
Skef,  see  Sceaf. 
Skirnir,  75,  78,  81,  184. 
Sleswick,  150,  273,  296. 
Soissons,  100;  Bishop  of,  see  Rothacl . 
Solius,  Christian  champion, 478  note. 
Somme,  Vikings  on  the,  350  sq. 
Sons  of  Godfred,  see  Godfred. 
Sons  of  Ragnar  Lodbrok,  see  Ragnar. 
Sorb^  (Sorabi),  300,  323,  325. 
South  islands,  see  Sudhreyar. 
Spain,  Viking  attacks  on,  282  sq., 

35?  m- 
Spanish  march,  I  27. 
Spears,  see  Weapons  of  Vikings. 
Spoleto,  Duke  of,  439. 
Spreewald,  46. 
Stein,  Viking  leader,  336. 
Stellinga,  270. 
Stephen  V.,  Pope,  238. 
Strathclyde  Britons,  104;  plundered 

by  Vikings,  398. 
Strandhog,  308. 
Streoneshealch  (Whitby),  council  of, 

106,  114. 
Suatopluk,  Duke  of  Moravia,   332, 

423  sq.,  462. 


Sudhreyar  (Hebrides),  the,  233. 

Suevi,  the,  18  sq.,  54,  99. 

Suiones,  the,  21  sq. 

Suithiod,  176,  230. 

Suithiod    (Greater),  498;    see   also 

Gardariki. 
Suleyman,  Emir  of  Bari,  418. 
Sun,  home  of  the,  71. 
Sunkbench  (Sbkkvabekkr),  46. 
Survivalofheathenism,  241  ;/<?/,?, 533. 
Sussex,  115. 
Sutherlandshire,  Norse  settlements 

in,  492. 
Svava,  61,  64. 
Svipdag,  79. 
Swabia,  248. 
Swan,  the,  in  Northern  mythology, 

64-6  sq. 
Swanage  Bay,  Vikings  defeated  in, 

399-. 
Swanhild,  67. 
Sweden,  297,  297,  &c. 
Sword,  see  Weapons  of  Vikings. 
Swords,  monastery  at,  97. 

Tacitus,  17  sqq.,  34,  54. 
Taghmon,  Viking  raid  on,  193. 
Tara,  93.  189. 

Taunus  hill-,  the,  n,  30,  528. 
Terminations   of    words  of    Norse 

and  Dani-h  origin,  393. 
Testudo,  use  of,  in  warfare,  473. 
Teutoberger  Wald,  the,  30,  34,  44, 

528. 
Teutonic  creed,  33. 
Teutonic  ecclesiasiics,  506. 
Thanet,  Vikings  in,    305  sq.,   325, 

370  sq. 
Thebaid,  monks  of  the,  88. 
Thegan,    biographer  of  Lewis   the 

Pious,  217. 
Theocracy,  502. 
Theodebert,  123. 
Theodolf  of  Orleans,  507. 
Theodore,  Abbot,  380. 
Theodoric,  Ostrogothic    king,  IOO, 

102. 
Theodoric,  Frankish  king,  122. 


INDEX. 


569 


Theodoric,  chamberlain  to  Charles 

the  Bald,  440,  443,  444. 
Therouanne,  plundered  by  Vikings, 

3°3,  447- 
Thierache,  forest  of,  460. 
Thietberger,   wife   of   Lothair   II., 

334,  409,  417,  424,  517  sqq. 
Thietgaud,    Archbishop  of  Treves, 

444,  5»9>  521  m- 

Thionville,  meeting  at,  309. 

Thor,  II,  51  sq.,  69,  74,  1 74. 

Thor's  oak,  41. 

Thora,  288. 

Thorgisl,  see  Turgesius. 

Thorkill,  183. 

Thorstein,  the  red,  495. 

Three  grave  mounds  at  Upsala,  53. 

Three  stages  in  early  history  of 
Christianity,  32. 

Thuin,  battle  of,  448. 

Thuringia,  Thuringians,  34,  Il8, 
128,  240,  451,  462. 

Tiberius,  16-17,  I25« 

Tighernach,  203. 

Tir-Connell,  199. 

Tiu,  or  This  (Tyr),  51. 

Toli,  378  sq. 

Tonsure,  dispute  over  the,  114. 

Torksey,  Vikings  in,  391. 

Tortona,  251. 

Tory  Island,  monastery  in,  94. 

Toul,  plundered  by  Vikings,  487. 

Toulouse,  281. 

Tours,  plundered  by  Vikings,  312, 
320. 

Tower  protecting  Paris,  472  sq. 

Trans-Albiani,  129. 

Transubstantiation,  525  note. 

Treasure,  166. 

'  Treasure-dispenser,'  167. 

Trebur,  diet  at,  489. 

Tree,  sacred,  41  sqq. 

Trenches,  use  of,  in  ancient  German 
warfare,  14. 

Treves,  II-I2;  plundered  by  Vi- 
kings, 455  ;  Bishop  of,  see  Thiet- 
gaud. 

Trinitarian  controversy,  86. 


Triptolemus-myth,  53. 

Tron,  St.,  abbot  of,   533;  see  also 

Cornelimunster. 
Troyes,  plundered  by  Vikings,  4S7. 
Tryggvesson,  Olaf,  159. 
Tundale,  vision  of,  109. 
Tune,  ship  found  at,  the,  156  note. 
Turgesius  (Thorgisl),  63,   196  sqq., 

250. 
Turhout,  abbey  of,  298. 
Tyr,  51. 

Ubbe,  Viking  leader,  son  of  Ragnar 
Lodbrok,  326,  371  sq.,  383,  399. 

Ulfila,  100. 

Ulfcetil,  ealdorman,  382. 

Ulster,  189. 

Upsala,  40,  53,  58. 

Utgardhloki  (Utgarthilocus),  75. 

Utrecht,  273. 

Utto,  Count,  defender  of  Paris,  472. 

Uvido,  Christian  champion,  478 
note. 

Vafrlogi,  78,  80. 
Vala,  see  Volva. 

Valence  plundered  by  Vikings,  422. 
Valenciennes,  313. 
Valens,  the  emperor,  39. 
Valentine,  Pope,  512. 
Valholl  (Walhalla),  66,  179. 
Valkyriur,  64,  67. 
Valland,  272,  276. 
Vandals,  the,  99. 
Varg-tre,  42. 
Varus,  16  sq.,  44. 
Vejta?)iskvidha,  the,  quoted,  81. 
Veleda,  61,  64. 
Verberie,  354. 
Verden,  210,  273,  487,  508. 
Verdun,  peace  of,  267,  423. 
Versification,  Latin,  224  sq. 
Vienne,  Count  of,  see  Boso. 
Vigfusson  quoted,  13,  164  note. 
Vik,  141,  176. 
Viken,  176. 

Vikings,  passim;  character  of,  155 
sqq. ;  dress  of,  429  ;    history  of, 


570 


INDEX. 


its  uniformity,  186 ;  leaders  of 
wAmund,  Bregsseg,  Bjorn,Fraene 
Godfred,  Guthorm,  Halfdan,  Ha 
mund,  Hasting,  Horm,  Ivar 
Jargna,  Oscar,  Ragnar,  Rorik 
Rudolf,  Saxulf,  Siegfred,  Sihtric 
Stein,  Turgesius,  Ubbe,  Weland 
Worm,  &c.  ;  ships  of,  25,  156  sq 

Village,  ancient  German,  35. 

Vinland,  209. 

Visigoths,  122. 

Visions,  108-10. 

Vistula    compared    to    Rhine,    12 ; 
trade  route  by,  23,  28. 

Vivianus,  Count,  311,  347. 

Volla,  52. 

Voluspa,  the,  62. 

Volva,  or  Vala,  62-3  sq.,  81. 

Voyage,  Gorm's,  57  note. 

Wala,  Abbot  of  Corbie,  221,  243, 

252,  440,  507,"  513,  536. 
Waldrada,  mistress  ol   Lothair  II., 

334,  412,  421,  519  sqq. 
Walafrid  Strabo,  109,  195. 
Walcheren,  253,  271  ;  plundered  by 

Vikings,  307-8. 
Wales,  Viking  attacks  on,  145,  398; 

names  of  places  in,  of  Scandi- 
navian    origin,   394  ;      see    also 

Welsh. 
Walhalla,  66,  179. 
Wall,  Roman,  6. 
Wandrille,  St.,  304. 
Wareham,  Vikings  in,  397-8  sq. 
Waterford,  Viking  settlement,  198, 

204. 
Watling  Street,  I,  2,  70,  403. 
Weapons  of  Vikings,  169-70  sqq. 
Weapons,  spiritual,  of  Christianity, 

225,  499. 
Wearmouth  (Monkwearmouth),  144, 

190. 
Wedmore,  peace  of,  402  sqq.,  446. 
Weland,     Viking    leader,     350-1, 

37o. 
Welf  of  Altdorf,  245,  343 ;  see  also 

Genealogical  Table. 


Welsh,  west  (Cornislimen),  202. 
Wessex,  see  West  Saxons. 
Westergau    (Frisia),  plundered    by 

Vikings,  302. 
Western  Christendom,  127  sq. 
Western  States  of  America,  165. 
Westfold,  176  note. 
West  Gothland,  176. 
Westphalians,  131  sq. 
West  Saxons,   1 38,  384  ;  kings  of, 

see  yElfred,    ^Ethelbald,    /Ethel- 

berht,      ./Ethelred,      yEthelwulf, 

Cuthred. 
Wexford,  194,  198. 
Whitby,  106,  114,  120. 
White  Christ,  the,  53. 
Whithern  (Candida  casa),  90,  312. 
Wido,  Duke  of  Spoleto,  King   of 

Italy,  489. 
Widukind,  132,  135  sq. 
Wigon,  Breton  prince,  430. 
WTild  huntsman,  531,  533. 
Wilfred,  St.,  114^.,  120. 
William,  Count  of  Toulouse,  281. 
William  II.,  son  of  Bernard,  Count 

of  Toulouse,  281. 
William,CountoftheEastMark,462. 
Willibert,   Archbishop  of  Cologne, 

435.  465- 

Willibrord,  St.,  1 16,  120. 

Wilton,  battle  of,  390. 

Wiltzi,  182. 

Winchester,  stormed  by  Vikings, 
350,  370. 

Winfred,  1 17,  120  ;  see  also  Boni- 
face. 

Wintering  of  Vikings,  in  Ireland, 
200  ;  in  England,  306,  370. 

Winwaedfeld,  battle  of,  137-8. 

Wistley  Green,  defeat  of  English 
on,  385. 

Wisdom,  59. 

Witches'  Sabbath,  68,  533. 

Witichin,  or  Witikin,  father  of 
Robert  the  Strong,  346. 

W7itikind,  see  Widukind. 

Wit  mar,  231. 

Wodin  (Wuotan,  &c),  18,  26,  42, 


INDEX. 


571 


44,  46,  51,    55,   57,  59<   63,  68, 

104,  529,  531. 
Wolf-tree,  42. 

Worm,  Long-,  see  '  Longworm.' 
Worm,  Viking  leader,  447. 
Worms,  12,  249,  455. 
Worsaae  on  Scandinavian   remains 

in  England,  392. 
Wyk-bij-Duurbtede,  211. 

Xanten     Abbey,     plundered     by 
Vikings  352>  45°- 

Ygg  (Odin),  43. 


Yggdrasil  (Vgg's  horse),  43. 

Ynglings,  the,  53. 

Youghall,   plundered    by    Vikings, 

194. 
York,   141  ;   Vikings  in,  374,  377, 

397-  . 

Yorkshire,  large  admixture  of  Scan- 
dinavian blood  in,  39S~6,  404. 


Zado,  Emir,  246. 

Zulpich   (Tolbiac),  battle  of,   115  ; 

plundered  by  Vikings,  452. 
Zwentibold,  see  Suatopluk. 


XTbe  Stovy  of  tbe  IRations. 


Messrs.  G.  P.  PUTNAM'S  SONS  take  pleasure  in 
announcing  that  they  have  in  course  of  publication,  in 
co-operation  with  Mr.  T.  Fisher  Unwin,  of  London,  a 
series  of  historical  studies,  intended  to  present  in  a 
graphic  manner  the  stories  of  the  different  nations  that 
have  attained  prominence  in  history. 

In  the  story  form  the  current  of  each  national  life  is 
distinctly  indicated,  and  its  picturesque  and  noteworthy 
periods  and  episodes  are  presented  for  the  reader  in  their 
philosophical  relation  to  each  other  as  well  as  to  universal 
history. 

It  is  the  plan  of  the  writers  of  the  different  volumes  to 
enter  into  the  real  life  of  the  peoples,  and  to  bring  them 
before  the  reader  as  they  actually  lived,  labored,  and 
struggled — as  they  studied  and  wrote,  and  as  they  amused 
themselves.  In  carrying  out  this  plan,  the  myths,  with 
which  the  history  of  all  lands  begins,  will  not  be  over- 
looked, though  these  will  be  carefully  distinguished  from 
the  actual  history,  so  far  as  the  labors  of  the  accepted 
historical  authorities  have  resulted  in  definite  conclusions. 

The  subjects  of  the  different  volumes  have  been  planned 
to  cover  connecting  and,  as  far  as  possible,  consecutive 
epochs  or  periods,  so  that  the  set  when  completed  will 
present  in  a  comprehensive  narrative  the  chief  events  in 


the  great  STORY  OF  THE  NATIONS  ;  but  it  is,  of  course, 
not  always  practicable  to  issue  the  several  volumes  in 
their  chronological  order. 

The  "  Stories  "  are  printed  in  good  readable  type,  and 
in  handsome  i2mo  form.  They  are  adequately  illustrated 
and  furnished  with  maps  and  indexes.  They  are  sold 
separately  at  a  price  of  $1.50  each. 

The  following  volumes    are  now  ready  (April,    1890): 

THE  STORY  OF  GREECE.     Prof.  Jas.  A.  Harrison. 

"  ROME.     Arthur  Oilman. 

"  THE  JEWS.     Prof.  James  K.  Hosmer. 

"  CHALDEA.     Z.  A.  Ragozin. 

"  GERMANY.     S.  Baring-Gould. 

"  NORWAY.     Hjalmar  H.  Boyesen. 

"  SPAIN.     Rev.  E.  E.  and  Susan  Hale. 

"  HUNGARY.     Prof.  A.  Vambery. 

"  CARTHAGE.     Prof.  Alfred  J.  Church. 

«  THE  SARACENS.     Arthur  Oilman. 

"  THE  MOORS  IN  SPAIN.     Stanley  Lane-Poole. 

"  THE  NORMANS.     Sarah  Orne  Jewett. 

"  PERSIA.     S.  G,  W.  Benjamin. 

"  ANCIENT  EGYPT.     Prof.  Geo.  Rawlinson. 

"  ALEXANDER'S  EMPIRE.     Prof.  J.  P.  Mahaffy. 

"  ASSYRIA.     Z.  A.  Ragozin. 

"  THE  GOTHS.     Henry  Bradley. 

"  IRELAND.     Hon.  Emily  Lawless. 

"  TURKEY.     Stanley  Lane-Poole. 

"  MEDIA,  BABYLON,  AND  PERSIA.  Z.  A.  Ragozin. 

"  MEDIEVAL  FRANCE.     Prof.  Gustav  Masson. 

"  HOLLAND.     Prof.  J.  Thorold  Rogers. 

"  MEXICO.     Susan  Hale. 

"  PHCENICIA.     Prof.  Geo.  Rawlinson. 

"  THE  HANSA  TOWNS.     Helen  Zimmern. 

"  EARLY  BRITAIN.     Prof.  Alfred  J.  Church. 

"  THE  BARBARY  CORSAIRS.  Stanley  Lane-Poole. 

"  RUSSIA.     W.  R.  Morfill. 

"  THE  JEWS  UNDER  ROME.     W.D.Morrison. 

"  SCOTLAND.   John  Mackintosh. 

Now  in  Press  for  immediate  issue: 

THE  STORY  OF  SWITZERLAND.  R  Stead  and  Mrs.  Arnold  Hug. 
4<    VEDIC  INDIA.     Z.  A.  Ragozin. 
c.     THE  THIRTEEN  COLONIES.  Helen  A.  Smith. 
11     MODERN  FRANCE.     Emily  Crawford. 
"     CANADA.     A.  R.  Macfarlane. 

G    P    PUTNAM'S  SONS  T.  FISHER  UNWIN 

New  York  London 


Deroes  of  tbe  IRations. 


EDITED    BY 


EVELYN  ABBOTT  M.A.,  Fellow  of  Balliol  College,  Oxford. 


A  SERIES  of  biographical  studies  of  the  lives  and  work 
of  a  number  of  representative  historical  characters  about 
whom  have  gathered  the  great  traditions  of  the  Nations 
to  which  they  belonged,  and  who  have  been  accepted,  in 
many  instances,  as  types  of  the  several  National  ideals. 
With  the  life  of  each  typical  character  will  be  presented 
a  picture  of  the  National  conditions  surrounding  him 
during  his  career. 

The  narratives  are  the  work  of  writers  who  are  recog- 
nized authorities  on  their  several  subjects,  and,  while 
thoroughly  trustworthy  as  history,  will  present  picturesque 
and  dramatic  "stories"  of  the  Men  and  of  the  events  con- 
nected with  them. 

To  the  Life  of  each  "  Hero  "  will  be  given  one  duo- 
decimo volume,  handsomely  printed  in  large  type,  pro- 
vided with  maps  and  adequately  illustrated  according  to 
the  special  requirements  of  the  several  subjects.  The 
volumes  will  be  sold  separately  as  follows  : 

Cloth  extra $i    50 

Half  morocco,  uncut  edges,  gilt  top       .         .         .        I   75 
Large  paper,  limited  to  250  numbered  copies  for 
subscribers  to  the  series.     These  may  be  ob- 
tained   in    sheets   folded,  or    in  cloth,  uncut 
edges       , 5  5° 


The    first    group    of    the    Series    will   comprise   twelve 

volumes,  as  follows  : 

Nelson,  and  the  Naval  Supremacy  of  England.  By  W.  Clark  Russell, 
author  of  "  The  Wreck  of  the  Grosvenor,"  etc.    (Ready  April  15,  1890.) 

Gustavus  Adolphus,  and  the  Struggle  of  Protestantism  for  Exist- 
ence.    By  C.  R.  L.  Fletcher,  M.A.,  late  Fellow  of  All  Souls  College 
Oxford. 

Pericles,  and  the  Golden  Age  of  Athens.  By  Evelyn  Abbott,  M.A., 
Fellow  of  Balliol  College,  Oxford. 

Alexander  the  Great,  and  the  Extension  of  Greek  Rule  and  of 
Greek  Ideas.     By  Prof.  Benjamin  I.  Wheeler,  Cornell  University. 

Theoderic  the  *Goth,  the  Barbarian  Champion  of  Civilization.     By 

Thomas  Hodgkin,  author  of  "  Italy  and  Her  Invaders,"  etc. 

Charlemagne,  the  Reorganizer  of  Europe.  By  Prof.  George  L.  Burr, 
Cornell  University. 

Henry  of  Navarre,  and  the  Huguenots  in  France.  By  P.  F.  Willert 
M.A.,  Fellow  of  Exeter  College,  Oxford. 

William  of  Orange,  the  Founder  of  the  Dutch  Republic. 
By  Ruth  Putnam. 

Cicero,  and  the  Fall  of  the  Roman  Republic.  By  J.  L.  Strachan 
Davidson,  M.A.,  Fellow  of  Balliol  College,  Oxford. 

Louis  XIV.,  and  the  Zenith  of  the  French  Monarchy.  By  Arthur 
Hassall,  M.A. ,  Senior  Student  of  Christ  Church  College,  Oxford. 

Sir  Walter  Raleigh,  and  the  Adventurers  of  England. 
By  A.  L.  Smith,  M.A.,  Fellow  of  Balliol  College,  Oxford. 

Bismarck.  The  New  German  Empire  :  How  It  Arose ;  What  It 
Replaced  ;  And  What  It  Stands  For.  By  James  Sime,  author  of 
"A  Life  of  Lessing,"  etc. 

To  be  followed  by  : 

Hannibal,  and  the  Struggle  between  Carthage  and  Rome. 

By  E.  A.  Freeman,  D.C.L.,  LL.D..  Regius  Prof,   of  History  in  the 
University  of  Oxford. 

Alfred  the  Great,  and  the  First  Kingdom  in  England.  By  F.  York 
Powell,  M.A. ,  Senior  Student  of  Christ  Church  College,  Oxford. 

Charles  the  Bold,  and  the  Attempt  to  Found  a  Middle  Kingdom 
By  R.   Lodge,  M.A. ,  Fellow  of  Brasenose  College,  Oxford. 

John  Calvin,  the  Hero  of  the  French  Protestants.  By  Owen  M. 
Edwards,  Fellow  of  Lincoln  College,  Oxford. 

Oliver  Cromwell,  and  the  Rule  of  the  Puritans  in  England. 

By  Charles  Firth,  Balliol  College,  Oxford. 

Marlborough,  and  England  as  a  Military  Power. 

By  C.  W.  C.  Oman,  A.M.,  Fellow  of  All  Souls  College,  Oxford. 
Julius  Caesar,  and  the  Organization  of  the  Roman  Empire. 

By  W.  Warde  Fowler,  M.A.,  Fellow  of  Lincoln  College,  Oxford. 

G.   P.   PUTNAM'S  SONS 
New  York  London 

27  and  :~9  West  Twenty-third  Street  27  King  William  Street,  Sikanb 


*3 


